Tag: artistic

Addison Tales: Ignite Your Student’s Imagination

Kelly Tenkely6 Comments on Addison Tales: Ignite Your Student’s Imagination10689 views

Addison Tales: Activate your student's imagination in descriptive writing

What it is: Addison Tales is an interesting interactive site that asks your students to contribute content.  This ongoing competition challenges students to invent an imaginative story character for Addison’s Tales.  When students visit the site, they will be introduced to Mr. Cornelius Addison.  If students click on the sparkly stars, they can visit the story’s characters.  When students click on Mr. Cornelius Addison, they will be taken to a story called “The Dream”.  The story is about Mack’s wild and imaginative store where he sells characters.  The story urges students to add characters to the store and then to “trap” their characters inside finished stories so that they don’t just remain figments of the imagination.  When students create their own characters, they make them “real” like the solid characters in the cottage that can be discovered inside the apps that are available from Addison tales in the app store.  The challenge is for students to write and draw interesting characters.

How to integrate Addison Tales into your classroom:  I think the way that Addison Tales combines technology, writing, drawing, story and imagination is brilliant!  Read “The Dream” with your students using classroom computers, an interactive whiteboard or projector-connected computer.  For those of you with iPads in the classroom, “The Dream” is also available as a free app.  After reading the story, talk about the types of characters described in “The Dream.”  This is a great way to get your students thinking about description and imagery!  Ask students to write down the adjectives and descriptive words that they remember from the story.  Students can choose a character from the story to draw.  For a fun class activity, invite students to all draw the same character and see what similarities and differences exist between student drawings.  (This can lead to some fun discussion about artistic license!) 

After students try their hand at describing characters from the story, they can work on creating their own character.  Students should think carefully about word choice and imagery.  Through December (2013) Addison Tales is running a competition where students can submit their characters.  Each week, Mr. Addison will frame a select number of characters on his wall with the artist’s nickname, country and character name for everyone to see.  At the end of the month, one of the most curious of the characters submitted will be turned into a plush toy and sent to the lucky artist.  Pretty great reward!

Tips: The contest portion runs every month through the end of December.  Even without the contest, the site offers a great way to introduce your kids to descriptive writing and imagery!

What do you think of Addison Tales?  How do you plan to use it in your classroom?

Picture a Story: Digital Storytelling

Kelly Tenkely9 Comments on Picture a Story: Digital Storytelling4006 views

What it is: As I mentioned a few days ago, I am starting a virtual classroom/club for digital storytelling.  I have been on the lookout for great resources, I listed my favorites here, and now I am remembering a lot of tools I left off of my original list (like Toon Doo!).  Today as I was going through my Google Reader, I learned about this gem from Richard Byrne’s Free Tech for Teachers.  The Delaware Art Museum has provided a great website dedicated to storytelling.  The tagline is “bringing visual art to life through stories”.  On the site, students can picture a story, experience a story, or tell a story.  The Picture a Story was the most intriguing portion for me, as it provides a great tool for telling a digital story.  First, students choose a genre of story that they want to tell, next they choose a famous painting background for their story, students add characters (also from famous works of art), props, and then tell the story.  In the tell the story section, students type out the story.  If a microphone is available, students can even record the story in their own voice.  When students have completed their story, it can be shared via email.

How to integrate Picture a Story into your curriculum: Stories are powerful.  I love the way that Picture a Story weaves together famous works of art with story.  It teaches students to reflect on the art that they encounter and think about the stories that it represents. Picture a Story is a great way to discuss genre, characters, and parts of a story.  It is also a fantastic way to bring a little art history into your classroom.  It would be a neat class experiment to have students choose all the same genre, background, characters, and props and, without talking to others, write their story.  After students are finished they can share their stories with the class.  Students will learn about perspective, creativity, and voice as they listen to all the different stories that originated from the same picture.  If you don’t have access to a computer lab, this activity could be done with an interactive whiteboard or projector connected computer and students writing on paper.  Let your students experiment with story and share their finished pieces with each other.  Picture a story is ideal in a lab setting where each student has access to their own computer.  If that isn’t a possibility, you could also have students visit Picture a Story on classroom computers as a storytelling center.  The site is quick to navigate through and students can tell a story in a sentence or a few paragraphs making it a good center.  If students don’t have access to email or can’t email the finished product to you, have them take a screenshot of the story to save in a digital portfolio or to print out.

Tips: The teacher section of this site has some great lesson ideas for every grade level.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Picture a Story in your classroom!

Jackson Pollock Whiteboard

Kelly Tenkely12 Comments on Jackson Pollock Whiteboard15073 views

Picture 7

What it is: Jackson Pollock was an influential American painter and a big name in the abstract expressionist movement.  Recently,  I was reminded about the Jackson Pollock Whiteboard interactive from the wonderful  Techie Classroom blog.   This website allows students to create Jackson Pollock-esque virtual paintings.  Students click anywhere on the screen for splatters of paint, drops, and dribbles.  As they are “painting”, students can press any key on the keyboard for a different background color, erase using the space bar, press alt+ any key to change the color of the drip, or use numbers 1-0 or left, right, up, or down arrow to change the color of the drip or background.  Jackson Pollock by Miltos Manetas is also an iPhone and iPod Touch application.

How to integrate Jackson Pollock Whiteboard into the classroom: This site is just plain fun!  Students will enjoy creating abstract works of art by clicking and moving around the virtual page.  Obviously this would be a great way to introduce students to abstract art and to Jackson Pollock, students could start by creating here, and then study Jackson Pollock and his famous paintings.  Put the Jackson Pollock website up on your interactive whiteboard and let your class create a Pollock masterpiece throughout the day.  Take a screen shot of the finished painting at the end of the day/class period.  This could be done every day over a week or month.  At the end of the week/month collect all of your classroom virtual paintings into a slide show.  Do the finished paintings convey the emotions of the days?  The slide show of paintings could also be used as a backdrop for information that students learned on their Jackson Pollock study.

Students Pollock masterpieces can be used for adding some color to the classroom walls, as a desktop picture or screen saver, or as thank you notes for classroom helpers.

Tips: In the iPod/iPhone version of the Jackson Pollock Whiteboard, multi-touch capabilities are built in for even more fun!

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Jackson Pollock Whiteboard in your classroom.

Aviary Toucan

Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment on Aviary Toucan2329 views

 

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.

Aviary Peacock

Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment on Aviary Peacock1657 views

I hope that you all had a blessed Christmas!  What I learned this year is that even though I take a break from posting, spammers do NOT break for holidays and other bloggers tend to blog MORE when they have a break to do so.  This means that #1 I have a lot of spam to sort through and #2 it has taken me a long time to get through my Google Reader!  I am finally getting around to a post that I intended to do several days ago (actually 3 posts) all on the Aviary creative suite of tools.  So, without further ado- here it is…

 

 

 

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.

 

Peacock is a “visual laboratory”that lets students experiment with pixel based images in fun ways.  Students can create pixel images applying filters (this will feel similar to other image editors such as Adobe).  Students can also blend several pixel based images together to create images.  These pixel images would make great backgrounds for other documents, web pages, or other Aviary tools.  Students can also upload “resources” or pictures from their computers or other sources to manipulate in Peacock.   Peacock easily integrates with the other Aviary tools switching images quickly between the applications.  This makes the possibilities for creativity endless.  

 

How to integrate Peacock into the classroom:   Aviary Peacock is a neat way for students to explore and experiment with visual arts.  The application really does feel like a laboratory.  Students start out with one image of their choosing and can manipulate the image with different filters, blenders, etc. to come up with completely new images.  It is interesting to experiment with the different ‘ingredients’ to see how an image can be transformed.  Peacock can be used to create backgrounds for web pages, documents, or other Aviary creations.  Peacock can also be used to help students understand cause and effect as they manipulate images.  

 

Tips:  Aviary Phoenix and Peacock are both in beta right now.  Be sure to check out the Peacock overview video to get an idea of how Peacock works.  

 

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using Aviary Peacock  in your classroom.