An elegant solution - the beauty of math and science in a K-8 art room.
The highest solution - it doesn’t come from your mind but through it. Who knows where the inspiration originates?
Qwiki Creator: Create the textbook of the future with a few clicks: Play the Qwiki: Anastasis Academy What it is... bit.ly/MarTkl
— Ed Tweeps (@Edtweeps) June 29, 2012
Sounds interesting - thanks to Ed Tweeps (!) for the heads up -
Read more about it at Free Technology for Teachers -
Yesterday I played with ImageSpike after reading a tweet by Richard Byrne. In the accompanying post on his blog he referenced thinglink, so I thought I would look at that today.
When I was looking at the gallery of finished projects I noticed someone had included links to sound files powered by SoundCloud. So I signed up and am thinking of ways to include SoundCloud in the classroom next year.
Great question! First, a teacher adds his/her class, which generates a unique code. The teacher then shares that code with students or parents. At that point, any student or parent who sends a text message with the code will be "subscribed" to the teacher's class. Any time a teacher sends a message from remind101, all the students or parents subscribed will receive it. This short videoexplains it A-Z.
Sometimes I don't even know where I find things to play with...
I should take screenshots of my browser history just to remember how I got from point A to point B...
I read a tweet over the weekend... that took me to top sites for teacher productivity....that had something about pearltrees... so I signed up to play later and did a search....nothing much on art ed... so I must have tried technology... and that took me to apps in education...which took me to a wiki page with a Glog "Welcome to 60 in 60! This site is a presentation created by Brandon Lutz. 60 in 60 is a fast paced presentation that goes over 60 technology tools in 60 minutes."
But that's not even what I noticed. It was the little flag on the side that allowed voicemail comments. Which I hadn't seen before, so I clicked to find out what 'powered' it and ended up with a SpeakPipe account for my blog.
So - it's not that I was looking for that, it just found me.
I need to take a screenshot.
The highest solution doesn’t come from your mind but through it.
I started playing with iBuildApp a couple of weeks ago and decided to try one for my classroom next year....
... and 2 days later I have one 'almost complete'.
Whew - what took so long?
I forgot what I did the first time.
Background art? Had to take an image and play with it a little. I ended up using Creative Kit (Picnik) and just fading over and over.
Banner? Don't have one - started out by playing in Word, saving as a jpeg. Again - just added text using Picasa and Creative Kit.
Then had to decide what I wanted to include. Dug up an old wikispace account to reuse (ouch - need to work on display/colors.)
Then couldn't remember how to add photos. Frustrating when I can see the directions, follow them, and still not have it work.
So...
here is what I have so far:
Right before school was out I started playing with the app Frame X Frame by JOBY. It is just too easy to use - even I figured it out.
We played with it a bit in class - changing the number of shots, interval and frames per second. To learn a more about what it could do I played with colored ice on watercolor paper. Sounds easy doesn't it? Well, it took a couple of tries. Initially I wanted to try the time lapse feature, but it kept crashing (fixed in a June update?) so I just used the stop motion feature.
I used an organic food dye to color the ice and I was surprised at how quickly it melted. I wet the paper before I started, but the end result wasn't very exciting... just a puddle on the paper.
My biggest mistake was not making more than one dyed ice cube at a time -
So I tried it again - wetting the paper, 'crushing' for texture, changing the interval/frames.
Again - meh.
An accident made it a little more interesting. The next cube of ice shattered (the organic food dye prevented the ice from becoming solid - I will have to test that later) and when it broke in pieces I left them on the paper where they fell.
Results (even I lose interest after the 1:00 mark- but I was playing with it to learn more about the app):
How could I use this in the art room? Easy to capture and share with my phone or touch. I can see using it for demos for the student wiki -
Have fun -
June 6th - my first day off this summer. And our oldest son's birthday - 2 reasons to celebrate!
Why hello/goodbye?
Hello to a new blog (I have had several over the years - tailored to the subjects taught), hello to new families as I switch to K-8 after many years of 4-8, hello to a summer of planning.
Goodbye to a class I loved - a 7th grade class that began as a supplement to the LA class... but grew to an arts-based literacy and numeracy class with a highlight on technology. Goodbye to the collaboration of my 7th graders and K-3 students on Anchorage Trail, the iPad lab and bookmaking activities... and let's face it after over 30 years, this is probably the beginning of my personal good-bye.
When I was looking at the gallery of finished projects I noticed someone had included links to sound files powered by SoundCloud. So I signed up and am thinking of ways to include SoundCloud in the classroom next year.
