Enhancing English Literacy Skills

2. Discuss some ways that you can use your art to enhance students acquiring English literacy skills.
Drawing on students' background knowledge and experiences, can be an effective way to bridge gaps and to make the content more accessible.
1. Learn about your students' backgrounds and find culturally relevant resources to teach content.
You can find ways for your students to contribute their own cultural experience in the classroom. This may mean asking students to show how a topic connects to their lives or to give an example of a particular idea as they would experience it in their native country. Students can bring music or art from their culture and describe its significance and meaning to their classmates. Students can also interview their parents in order to learn more about their memories and experience. These strategies will work in mainstream classes as well. For example, if U.S. students are studying civil rights in the 1960's, they may remember information better if they relate it to historical and cultural information shared by family members.

2. Look for resources that go beyond the textbook
Try to find materials that will engage students and involve them in the learning process so that they find elements they can connect to and learn from. These may include:

Art
There are many ways to bring educational content to life through art, and to use art as a starting point for discussing different cultural traditions. Using artwork that depicts day-to-day events and celebrations can also be a provocative starting point for a discussion about the similarities and differences between other cultures, and a way of affirming the students' daily lives, traditions, and lifestyles in the classroom.
Music
Students are a great resource for sharing music, and older students especially like to share music, discuss the meaning, and connect it to content. If the song is in a language some students do not understand, ask the student to translate it and discuss the meaning. Songs from other countries often describe political events or re-tell folk stories in poetic form.
3. Use literature, stories, and folktales from other cultures as a way of encouraging students to connect what they are reading to their own experiences, and Use storytelling in the classroom.
Many cultures have a rich tradition of storytelling that often gets lost in the U.S. with the focus on developing literacy skills. Many of the common stories in cultures have been translated and written in story form, but children also enjoy telling and acting out stories.
In the end, the efforts that teachers make to add a rich, cultural dimension to the curriculum will enhance student learning and comprehension, and create excitement in the classroom.

Technology's Impact on Arts Education

http://www.jstor.org/pss/3193623

I think technology is supplying useful tools and resources to build a new knowledge base for arts education. Developed access to information and resources, plus opportunities to engage directly with educators and the creative process or otherwise experience real-time performances, are changing the way we teach and learn about the arts. As a result, the arts are better placed to take their place as a core subject area in the K-12 curriculum.
Most importantly, networking technologies are making it possible for students and teachers to draw upon performing arts-based tools, resources, and environments that were simply not available in the past. Technology enables today's students to discover, create, display, and evaluate their work in the visual and performing arts as part of an ongoing collaborative and creative process that may include their teacher and peers. It also supplies students with the opportunity to produce personal growth and achievement and to achieve a better perceptive of their own natural creativity.
These new and important technologies to arts education will have a thoughtful impact on arts education and will change the way in which some people will understand and participate in the cultural life of his or her community.
In Music Education and its relationship with technology, is an organization TIME (Technology Institute for Music Education) and how they are checking the demand for music technology training and spreading awareness to music educators. I think in order to contact the students of today, teachers must always stay up to date on discovering and creating the newest technologies in the classroom because the students today are growing up with technology as a constant factor in their lives.