An art teacher at the regional high school was recently honored by National Geographic for his work in the classroom and beyond.

Chris Baer, who teaches photography and technology at the regional high school, was named National Geographic Geo-Educator of the week in September for his work in documentary photography exchange projects, a series taught for the past 10 years which connects students in Island classrooms to their peers from all over the world.

Mr. Baer is currently the art design and technology department chairman and teaches four photography classes.

“My job allows a lot of creativity and it's fun,” he told the Gazette Tuesday. “It’s not like I have this big book and I turn to chapter 14 to teach. I’m sort of forced to write my own curriculum, but that’s the draw of what I do. I recreate semester to semester. I’m never quite satisfied. I’m always changing things.”

His teaching theory has worked.

This summer the former director of the nonprofit International Education and Resource Network (also called iEARN), a group Mr. Baer often works with to connect his students to others globally through cyberspace, emailed him to ask if he wanted to participate in a panel with a live virtual audience in a Google+ Hangout with National Geographic to talk about international classroom projects. “It’s hard to say no to National Geographic, so I said sure,” Mr. Baer said.

Then in September, Mr. Baer found out he was going to be featured separately on the National Geographic Education blog, and that he was named Geo-Educator of the week.

“The idea here is about authentic audiences and groups of people who care about work other than just the teacher. It’s something I’ve been having fun with for a couple of years and it seems to work,” he said.

At their meeting Monday, the regional high school committee gave Mr. Baer a round of applause for his accomplishments and congratulated him for being recognized by National Geographic.

Mr. Baer then gave a slideshow presentation to the committee to show the type of work he and his students have recently been up to.

One of his classes, he said, is working on an alternate reality project where students in his classroom connect with students in Argentina by being photographed individually against a blank background and then Photoshopped together to make it look like they are in the same space.

“If a student can’t walk in another student’s shoes, maybe we can photoshop them in. That’s been my tagline,” Mr. Baer said.