What’s your Passion Project?

Being a Professional Development Specialist and technology coach at Five Star often means being called into situations where you could be asked to provide solutions to anything and everything related to school technology. Then, there are other times when you are asked to provide expert guidance and support on a topic you are truly passionate about outside of the classroom. 

Aside from being licensed teachers and Certified Google Trainers, each member of the Professional Development Team at Five Star has also nurtured various skills along the way. Mine happens to be graphic design, often within the realm of education. When I’m not helping teachers create awesome learning experiences, I’m more than likely designing logos, sports schedule posters, t-shirt artwork, senior banners, and more. 

I recently received a call from a high school Sports Marketing class to assist as an outside expert. First of all, the fact that there is a Sports Marketing class is amazing in and of itself. Second, their teacher (Mr. Dugan) has embraced more of a PBL mindset.  Instead of just learning about sports marketing, each student has been tasked with creating a sports team from the ground up and learning from experts about key points of the process along the way. The students in the Sports Marketing class were in the logo design aspect of their projects, so Mr. Dugan asked me to check-in with the students and see how I could help. Each student was at a different stage on their logo journey, which allowed me to engage with the class on nearly every step of the process. 

Here are some things we discussed and a few of the student’s logos: 

• One student was stuck at the very beginning and didn’t know where to begin. We started from scratch by making a quick list of the attributes they wanted to include in the logo. This helped focus the student’s work and provide some direction. She took the three things she wanted to focus on and incorporated them into her design. 
• One student had already created a rough draft but had an issue where there was too much information present. This was causing the viewer to “work too hard” to understand what he was trying to convey. We talked about simplifying to the most important part, and he trimmed it down to make it easier to understand.  
• One student was trying to decide between using the design tools of Google Drawings or Canva to transition their hand-drawn sketch into a digital format. We verbally compared each of these to determine which would better suit their needs. 
• One student’s logo design was pretty much done, but there were some lines and text that were not aligned properly. We looked at changing some of the lines in his logo so they were equal on both sides and more legible to the viewer.