Learning and Leading - November 2012

By Diana Fingal

Excellent Educ ators

ISTE’s Award Winners Inspire, Captivate, and Motivate!

In the impassioned debate about school reform, there is one point that all sides agree on: Classroom teachers have a huge impact on student success. Great teachers don’t just teach. They inspire, they captivate, and they motivate their students to create, investigate, solve, and continue learning long after their school years are over.

ISTE loves great teachers, as well as library media specialists, technology coordinators, school leaders, and preservice teachers. Each year, we set out to recognize the best of the best with ISTE awards in the hopes that by highlighting great teachers, leaders, and scholars, we will inspire other educators to stretch just a little further to make our schools exciting places to learn.

We’d like to introduce you to our 2012 award-winning ISTE educators and share what makes them great, because learning from each other is the ISTE way!

Outstanding Teacher: Matt Cauthron, digital arts instructor, Palm Springs Unified School District, Cathedral City, California, USA

When it comes to providing students with real-world experience, it’s hard to beat digital arts instructor Matt Cauthron. He uses Apple’s Challenge-Based Learning model, which he helped design, to inspire students to create high-quality work. Students choose authentic, collaborative, and competitive challenges to work on, and they decide how they will design their projects. They might, for example, choose to enter The Spotlights, a prestigious photography competition in Los Angeles, California, USA; submit a Google Doodle for Google’s national contest; submit photos to be included in a book; or participate in dozens of other exhibits or competitions.

Walk into Cauthron’s classroom, and you might see students working on a collaborative art project with third graders, preparing for a photo shoot at the exclusive El Paseo Fashion Show, participating in the international Rotoball project, or working on 3D animations for SkillsUSA state competitions.

This approach motivates students, says Lee Grafton, president of the Cahuilla, California, chapter of

Computer Using Educators, who nominated Cauthron for the award. “The ability to be in charge of their own work; to engage in marketable, published projects; and the latitude to take risks empowers the students and often results in exceptional products,” he says.

Cauthron teaches more than just art. Through real-world experience, he educates his students about the business of art. He also engages students through social media, portfolio, and internet tools, such as Ning, Wiki-spaces, Mobile Me galleries, Google Docs, Issuu, Picasa, Vimeo, Animoto, and many others.

Cauthron takes his teaching beyond the school and even district walls by collaborating with educators and artists from around the globe. He spearheaded the Student Creative, a series of global challenges that brings students’ photographic worlds together as a collection of digital books. Proceeds from the e-books support children of the AIDS epidemic in Malawi.