Woven Optical Illusions

Maintaining a quality art program for middle-school students while learning about art in a blended model requires inventiveness, patience, adaptability, and imagination. Art teacher Lauren Conti’s video “Woven Optical Illusion in Google Drawings” (see Resource) serves as the inspiration for this lesson. Because the Google Drawings app is included with the Chromebook and can be used in Google Classroom, this art teacher and her students, no matter where or when, have the materials and resources they need to be their best artistic selves.

Transforming Education
For the first time at our middle school, all students have a 1:1 ratio with the Chromebook and Google Classroom. These Chromebooks are a real game-changer in art education, as students are no longer dependent upon the teacher to learn a skill or concept in real-time. Students get to see the details up close, replay demonstrations, and become increasingly self-directed.

Five Choices for Learning
Through differentiated design, students access a main art classroom slide consisting of five images that link to the lesson. Consistency in the setup is key for middle-school learners. Students choose the resources that best fit their learning style.

Short Tutorial: View five minutes of a visually stimulating, time-lapsed video to provide a chunked overview of the lesson, increase visual literacy, and reduce word fatigue.
Google Slides: Auto-play still images or short videos of demonstrations and instructions, hyperlinked resources, choice boards, screen recordings, student and professional exemplars, and supplementary resources.
Google Docs: Review a word-based task analysis list with key concepts and skills that link to the lesson’s video thumbnails. Self-paced learning is reinforced by formative and summative learning.
Adobe Spark Video: View a one-minute narrated overview of ways to stay organized.
Google Forms: Share/collect file uploads, multiple choice answers, and written reflections. Download PNG and JPEG files to use on social media platforms and online art shows for arts advocacy.

Learner Autonomy
Students select the present button within Google Slides to auto-play the content. Each slide contains a one-minute explanation and multiple demonstrations of a particular step. Choice boards are embedded and optional at multiple junctures of the lesson. Students toggle between the video learning experience, the art project, and in-person and online support with the teacher.

The art teacher supports students in real-time through the differentiated forums by receiving in-person questions, responding to emails, listening to students talking live by unmuting, answering questions in the chat, and presenting the screen via Google Meet.

Woven Optical Illusions
In this flipped classroom model, students gain a familiarity with the tools and skill set centered on developing a woven optical illusion.

Students open the Google Drawings app, name their file, and move the file to their art folder in Google Drive.

After inserting a custom gradient in their large background shape, students insert a small rectangle consisting of a black and transparent custom gradient. The border weight is set to four pixels, and the rectangle is duplicated. Keyboard shortcuts are modeled and practiced, and students continue to duplicate and rotate this rectangle across the page.

The red snap-to guide ensures the positioning and centering of the shapes. Rows of rectangles are formed, and students repeat and finish their pattern. They adjust and zoom in, reflecting upon their artistry and overall design. Black squares are made to fill in the areas between the transparent rectangles. The canvas is resized and shapes that extend beyond the page are cropped. Students upload their in-progress work and the final project to Google Forms.

Students created woven optical illusions they were proud of and gained ownership over their learning in the process.