What it is: Aviary is a website on a mission to make creativity more accessible. They do this by making powerful image software available online (no download required) and with free versions of the online software. Aviary has four different offerings: Peacock, Phoenix, Toucan, and Raven. Because each tool does something different, I am going to break it down into four posts.
Toucan is the third application in the Aviary suite. Toucan is a color palette chooser. It is a simple tool but combined with the other Aviary applications is pretty powerful for the creativity process. Choose colors for your palette and then adjust hue, saturation, hue, light, CMYK, and RGB. The color palette helps students learn about relationships between colors on the color wheel. As students manipulate and choose colors from the color wheel, they can save to the clip board. When color palettes are in the clipboard, students can filter out colors in their palette or expand colors. There is also an image chooser where students can choose an image and then pick colors directly from the image. The last cool tool in Toucan is a color deficiency tool where you can see what people who are color blind might see when they are viewing your color palette (especially helpful for website creation!). After you create a color palette, it can be imported into Pheonix or Peacock. In the color chooser in Pheonix, you can click a special button to import your swatches from Toucan. Neat!
How to integrate Toucan into the classroom: Aviary Toucan is a wonderful addition to any art or science class studying color. The color wheel and adjustment options make it easy to see and understand color relationships as well as concepts like hue, tint, and saturation. This would be a great tool for students to explore individually, recording observations about hue, tint, saturation, etc. as they discover how each affects color. Toucan would also be useful for whole class instruction on color with a projector. The ability to create color palettes is a great tie in for the other Aviary applications as well as for website design. I love the color deficiency tool that allows you to see what the colors in your color palette look like to someone with color blindness. This is a nice way to teach students about color blindness and useful when creating websites, advertisements, etc.
Tips: Aviary Phoenix, Peacock, and Toucan are both in beta right now. Be sure to check out the Toucan overview video to learn more about how Toucan works. The video breaks down the application nicely.
Leave a comment and tell us how you are using Aviary Toucan in your classroom.
