May
22
Having fun with photography: Game Day Thursday
Filed Under Art, Games | Leave a Comment
Photojojo presents a great page on playing games with photography. These games are intended to express and develop photographic creativity.
While these games would work well in a photography or graphic design course, they are easily transferable to your average art course. Using drawing from a book, magazine, or a portfolio, or even ones you draw on the spot you could award points for the most appropriate or most interesting responses. The competitive nature of these games is likely to keep most kids interested in them. They could be used as warmup activities to start the creative juices flowing, or full blown assignments if you chose.
Art doesn’t have to be a solo activity but can easily be competitive and done with or against other people. Since kids, especially high school kids, are social by nature, this should make art that much more interesting.
Apr
11
Need some graph paper?
Filed Under Art, Math | Leave a Comment
I’m not a math teacher, so I don’t normally have any graph paper lying around. I do, however, use it occasionally to have my classes make things like crosswords, or sometimes art classes use it to help set up a drawing. If you need graph paper but can’t find it, what do you do?
Believe it or not, this is actually a problem the Internet can solve. This online Graph Paper can be set to different styles, lines per inch, and even colors.
I don’t know who had so much time on their hands that they decided to supply a way to custom make graph paper, but it’s kind of handy.
Apr
9
Working with video
Filed Under Art, General | 2 Comments
Normally I’m not one to show off my students’ work to the greater world, but I’m going to make an exception. These three videos are not-bad applications of stop motion animations. While there’s some choppiness, some weird lighting, and other problems all three videos are not bad for a first try. The students (and me) are learning.
I decided to post these on TeacherTube instead of YouTube because although TeacherTube seems a little bit clunkier at times, it also seems to get past more schools divisions’ web filters.
This project was also done on the cheap. Besides the computers (which the school already had), and Microsoft Movie Maker (already available if you’ve got Windows XP), we also used some really cheap webcams (found online at The Source), and some free stop motion animation software.
Nov
30
Skrbl
Filed Under Art, Collaboration | Leave a Comment
The newest and coolest tool that I’ve found is Skrbl.com. It is a website that works as an online whiteboard. It’s a simple version of a program like Microsoft Paint where you can make easy illustrations that other people can edit. With the free version (and, of course, with the paid version, too) you can make your particular whiteboard or drawing private so only you can work on it. If your pictures are worth keeping you can publish them as a webpage which you can link to from any other site.
If you’d like to test out this funky little site, they let you embed a scribble pad right in any other webpage.
The documentation for the site is pretty weak since the site is only in beta and still being developed. Yet you appear to be able to create and unlimited number of whiteboards, each with its own unique web address/URL, so you could have a theoretically unlimited number of students working together (which is a really mind boggling idea).
I’m not sure yet what to do with the site, but I’m going to give it a good try to figure something out. This is a promising Internet tool that I’m going to like.
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