More art

Yesterday I spend a long time  checking out art sites. Interestingly enough, I had difficulties being able to get my art from the sites onto my blog.  The difficulties were the usual suspects - no way to copy/paste from the originating site;  site too complex (or used obscure vocab)  to quickly and easily tranfer the image, or image transferred in an unusable manner - huge photo which couldnt be sized down.  Today I will try again to get at least one of the sites illustrated in this blog.

Splashup seems and looks similar to Photoshop Elements, but I've visited it twice, trying various methods of working with only frustration, same problems as above.  I expect, when it looks so similar that it act similar.

Blabberize looks fun.  Here's how one teacher folds it into an assignment researching artists.  That, too, was my first thought.  Instead, I thought I might use it to introduce my 4 classroom tables, each named after a different artist . Here's Jackson Pollock.   I wanted to have this embedded here but couldnt figure that out.

After reading Heidi's and Kate's blog, I'll have to give popplet a try.

ART!

Time to play, and explore.
Shiddoni a cute site. seems for younger kids altho good drawing skills  and tools would make this more enjoyable.  You create a pet and it's surroundings using your own drawings.  You gain points and increase drawing options by completing drawing tasks related to your pet. No way to copy and paste  my pet, Katty, here.  The only way to share is by joining the site and becoming friends with Katty.

The NGA site is one I've used before altho not for the still life activity.  After trying it, it feels old and clunky- wooden movement with limited actions.  Not very easy to use.

Art!

Now to explore Art sites.

The NGA site I've seen before but I did check out the still life option.  I created one, but found the technology old and clunky.  There must be something better out there. This Arts Connected site is similar  but with a bit more learning involved.

Squinchpix is really cool - it's a visual dictionary of historical sites and related art in Europe.

Cosketch is great for sharing visual ideas between 2 people online.  The few stamps included are appropriate - for example, in 'sports' there's a field with markings - soccer? 

the MOWA site, Museum of Web Art has a resources page with MORE ART sites to explore!

Shiddoni was fun  but it was a game where you created characters, settings etc. and earned more options thru playing games with your created chracters.  - good computer drawing skills  a plus.  Not something I'd use in the art classroom.   

Splashup, a photo editing site ( maybe also a drawing site) had me stumped from the start 'cause i couldnt resize a photo I was gonna play with.  So, ease of use is an issue for now.

Myoats is very a cool radial symmetry tool.  Seems like you can also use it for regular drawing but I couldnt figure that out.  I think the students would really like this site.

That's it for now.  I'll check out  more later.

Visual Stuff

Loved the Periodic Table of Visualization - ha ha, visual of visuals.  I like this all together but as always, if you don't know the creator's vocabulary, you might spend a while searching for the type of visual device best utilized for your info. I get the impression that you have to know what you need when you do a web search for these tools.
Here are some of the Visualization tools:

Tagxedo of "Whole New Mind"

• word clouds - description of artwork, descriptions of Ps and Es ( Tagul can use custom shapes!) 

After reviewing the various word cloud tools, it seems like they primarily target lower Blooms thinking skills. That said, these might be perfect ways to review or initially apply new concepts in art to verbal visual.  visual thesaurus - map of word synonyms

Graphic organizers always sound cool to me but somehow seem too complex to create - also idk how you'd best use the info documented in one.. The link below does suggest specific uses for certain types so this is a chart worth having.

graphic organizers - explore principles and elements of art in an artwork (in class) - a spider map?

here's another set of organizers -  Pacific Learning  (the url in the class wiki doesnt work)  and Eduplace's set, Freeology's set  which are cute but very specific,  a set of organizers to select by their visual arrangment, and this for making your own printable versions.

OK.  So the above organizers are means towards an end so you select accordingly.  Mind Maps are records of ideas or relationships - and my bet is that Mind maps would be more meaningful in the art room. The link is to a scoop it site which has a great collection of ideas for using the mind maps. SO here's a mindmap of Daniel Pink's Whole New Mind , just to get an idea of how it could look. This is so awesome - Mindmap ART!!!! Here's a cool one on creative intelligence

http://www.mindmapinspiration.com/top-10/ by Alan and Emily Burton

and here's the hows and whys of using mnd mapping to visualize your to-do list .  This is the working link to the additional Mindmappng sitesvmentioned on the wiki.  

Audio Tools

Ahh - Voicethread.   I've used it before, and kinda like it but kinda not.  Last year a small group of art teachers used it as a way to have a book-club discussion. However, I found that it wasnt a good fit - each chapter was a pic or two and we each said something about the chapter.  My suspicions are that there's some other tool that would better fit our needs.  I think it would be great to comment about an artwork or series of artworks, tho.  In the tutorial, using VT as a device for sharing instructions caught my eye.  That's something I should think about altho again, I'm not sure it's the best tool for that.  One of my early experiences with VT was in an online art course, where we were discussing an artwork.  It was great for that! 

Fotobabble looks like fun - I could see using it to add info to a pic  - HA !  What if I had various artworks which the kids could pretend to make talk!  That'd be an interesting way to explore meaning in artworks, and the kids would love it.  Would need some cows for that.  It could also be a way for them to add an artist's statement to a photo of their own work.

LittleBirdThreads was also fun, a way to string together works.  Maybe I can figure out a way to use this with the 5th grade on their upcoming play based on fairy tales.

Voki - found some lesson plans using Voki, and checked 'em out.  The down side is that the voice is very computerized - not so great when compared with LBT or Fotobabble. Some of these tools seem to  overlap so I'm not sure what criteria you'd use to select one over the other.  My guess is it 's things like how many frames the site can accept, or as previously stated, the sound of the voice.

So off the top of my head, Voice Thread and Little Bird Threads seem like they'd be the best fit for things I'd like to do, usually with many or all students from a class.  I also prefer the student's voice to a computerized one.  If the student wanted to mask their voice, no doubt they could figure out a way to do that. 

Digital Storytelling

Digital storytelling seems like it would be helpful in the art room.  One of the tools I like best is HelloSlide which I could imagine would be wonderful for combining art projects with artist's statements.  I like Flipsnack, but am not sure how often it would be used in my classroom. Last year, some of the 3rd grade created and illustrated their own books, so it's a possibility.  Could I incorporate both kinds of 'digital storytelling' into an art show? 

One of the big stumbling blocks with these storytelling sites, from the perspective of the art room, is the illustration, since that's an aspect that we focus on in art - creating your own illustrations.  Most of the sites provide illustrations - yes, they are varied and beautiful, but they are not the work of the student.  That's why the two sites mentioned above work for me - they allow the student's storytelling as well as their artwork to shine.    Altho I tried and tried, Grabba Beast wasn't on the web (?) so I could only learn about it from other sites.  The concept is a fun cross between drawing and writing a description - it'd be fun for an interdisciplinary lesson. 

Recently on my listserv one of the teachers was talking about flipping her classroom by creating demo videos which would be accessible by students at each studio ( guess that requires a number of laptops.)  The beauty of that would be that the demo could be repeated, as desired, by the students, freeing me up to help with other situations.  Maybe with Creaza? or  Flipsnack (definitely Flipsnack for origami.)

An aside, Jason Ohler's site on Digital Storytelling has extensive assessment notes on digital storytelling which could be helpful for me in considering how to refine rubrics for my studios.

21st Century Brains

HA! Vision trumps all other senses!!!  Flipping thru the info passed out the first day, I've been slowing down to read the notes from  Brain Rules a bit more carefully.  Even tho we know that vision is important to learning and many, many folks are visual learners ( are there more visual learners now than ever before because of technology?)  I feel as if school art so often gets short shrift.  However, the 4 C's of 21st Century Skills - Creativity and Innovation, Critical Thinking and Problem Solving, Communication, and Collaboration are very closely tied to much of art making.  Additionally, information fluency is now a increasingly critical skill,very  often tied to the visual aspects of what are anticipated skills necessary for our futures.

It's all about visual memory and visual processing skills.  How can I bank on this in the art room?