I love working with radial designs in my art room. I usually work with kaleidoscope designs with my second graders and radial/mandala designs with fourth graders. Most mandala designs are symmetrical. The meaning of “mandala” comes from Sanskrit, meaning center or circle. The design usually begins in the center and branches outward.
"Mandala Maker" is a web 2.0 tool that allows anyone to create a mandala design online. This can be a great addition to my introduction to my lessons on mandalas/radial designs. On this site, students can use geometric shapes to design 1/8 of their mandala. This is a great pictorial illustration of fractions. Students have options to change colors, rotate the scale and skew the shapes. Once the students feel that they have completed their design or just want to take a peek at their design as a whole, they can press view design. This is when the magic of symmetry begins! Students will begin to “Oooohhhhh!” and “Aaaahhhh!” at what they have created but they will not be satisfied just yet! Now the curiosity kicks in and students will continue to play around by clicking “Continue working”. Who would have thought!? Eventually students will finally become satisfied with a design and it can be e-mailed to themselves or to someone else. I can definitely use this as warm-up project prior to their detailed hands-on art project.
Not only is this a great art lesson, it reinforces many concepts that are taught in our Everyday Math series and allows for cross-curricular teaching, which is a huge push in my district. Grade level teachers really appreciate the additional practice with terminology being taught in math. A few mathematical topics that will be revisited as a result of this activity include geometric shapes, symmetry, fractions, patterns, and measurement (height/width). This web 2.0 tool is not only an engaging introduction for an art project, but it is educational and enjoyable.
Roxy said...
Good find Jaime!!! I like the idea of a comic strip and the use of avatars created by students. Bitstrips seems to give more options for building avatars, which for me as an art teacher, that's a plus. For example, the Wii game system gives options but in the tour for bitstip, there seems to be many more choices for the students to build their own unique avatar so that no two are identical. I can see using this with an art club. Thanks!!!
This image was created by Erin Lodes using wordle.net. It is copyrighted to www.wordle.net under creative commons.
Roxy said...Wow! If I had taken a music class back when I was in school, I would have loved this class. Creating my own music to play in my current music game that I play! That is awesome! That would definitely get my friends and I excited about the class, the assignment and get us talking about it in our blogs! Great choice! I would love to see some examples!
Animoto is a web 2.0 tool that automatically generates professionally produced videos with motion design. The videos that are created are unique each time. No two videos are alike. The user selects what photos, videos and soundtrack they want to use and Animoto does the rest.
This web application can be useful for back-to-school nights. I can have each computer in my art room display different works of art for each grade level so parents can see what their child will be creating in that grade level. I can also use this presentation for individual student portfolios. Students can take photos or scan in their artwork to create their own Animoto presentation to share with family and friends at the end of the year. Examples of art work can be shared with other art teachers in the district or posted on my blog to share with others around the world. I can even take video clips of students creating their works of art and import it along with the photos to make a more appealing video piece.
Once your video has been created, there are more options available. You can re-edit your video to get a totally different effect by a click of a button, download it, or send it as a greeting card or receive the embedded code to place the video on a blog, site, or social network.
When you sign-up for a free account, you have access to Animoto Shorts. These videos are 30-seconds in length. You have unlimited access to produce, remix, and share as many videos as you'd like. With full-length videos you can do the same but this allows the videos to be as long as a whole song and are downloadable.
Right now Animoto is offering all educators a classroom code for an All-Access pass for producing videos for assignments and presentations at your school. Here is the website to sign-up, http://animoto.com/education/getting_started
Magic Pen is a web 2.0 flash game that works like a brainteaser. It is a physics-based puzzle playground created by Alejandro Guillen. Using the mouse, players draw shapes with a crayon to get a red ball across the screen toward a flag. In order for the players to accomplish this, players must draw bridges and other shapes to get the red ball to move toward its destination. Any shapes can be drawn anywhere to make this possible. Players can even use pins and hinges to connect shapes to get them to swing and move other shapes.
This game is addictive! The shapes are affected by gravity, friction and inactivity. You must understand how physics works in order to complete the task. Once you draw an object it is set in motion. It is extremely challenging. I tried testing out the game and the next thing I knew an hour had passed. I wasn’t even far in the game but was enjoying the challenge. This game can get the students to use their critical thinking skills to move on to the next level of the game. I can see teachers, like myself, using this game as a reward for students who have completed a project early. Play now! http://magic.pen.fizzlebot.com/
Dropbox
Dropbox is a web 2.0 tool that allows anyone to access files, photos and music from any Internet accessed computer. Think of it as a USB drive, but you don’t have to carry it around. I am one who is constantly carrying around a USB drive to access files from one computer to the next. Using Dropbox can be helpful in my art room, here’s how: Students who are absent or have missed art class are now a week behind. I can use Dropbox to access a PowerPoint file that is currently being used with a class on another computer. The student who is a week behind can sit at another computer to see last week's steps without interrupting the class time. The student can work independently while I instruct the class on the next step. While the class begins working on their project, I can revisit the student who is working independently.
When traveling from room-to-room, Dropbox can be useful, especially for those art teachers who are still art-on-a-cart (sad face). This allows the accessibility to the files needed to teach the class in a different classroom without the fear of “Oops! I forgot my flash drive at home or in my classroom. Or forgetting your flash drive in someone else’s classroom!"
The Dropbox program can be installed on your computer or computers to drop files in and out of the storage area. The changes that are made on one computer will be saved on all computers since it is the same Dropbox account. There is even a website that you can access your files from without having Dropbox installed!
You can also share files and folders in Dropbox. A file can be sent to a “Public” folder and that particular file will receive its own URL. This URL can then be posted into a Blog, Facebook, IMs, e-mails, etc. Dropbox even has the option to share folders with other users by e-mailing the Shared file to another Dropbox account. This gives the shared users the ability to share files in that folder, add more files, and make changes to those existing files. All changes will be shown on both desktops.
Signing up for a free account on www.dropbox.com allocates 2GB of storage for free! If you would like more storage, it is available for a monthly fee. This web 2.0 will be extremely useful in my district!
Image created by Lori Pickering 2009
That was a lot of fun! I will definitely be using this during my lesson of Mandalas! It will be even more exciting when I hook it up to the smartboard!!! Thanks for the idea Lori!!
Social bookmarking is a great web 2.0 tool that allows users to access and save bookmarks to the web and access saved bookmarks from any internet connected computer. With social bookmarking users can store, tag, share and search for links to online subject matter. You can make social connections with other individuals interested in just about any topic (Lomas, 2005).
Tagging bookmarks is what makes social bookmarking effective. By tagging bookmarks users can narrow down a search from a large list of bookmarks. When users need to look for something specific, a search can be performed using the tag terms or keywords. Users who create these labels or key terms to define resources are known as “Folksonomy”. Now when a user begins a search using a key label/tag to get the collected archive, it will be based on users who previously tagged those resources with that same label (Department of Education, 2009).
Social bookmarking is a great educational tool for students and educators. Educators can use social bookmarking to gather information abut a topic that will be taught and tag the resources with the necessary labels (The McGraw-Hill Companies, n.d.). Students can use social bookmarking to help create and share reference lists, bibliographies, papers, and other resources for a specific topic (Lomas, 2005). Teachers can set up an account for each class with a shared user name and password (Department of Education, 2009). In this account, resources can be tagged with labels for the current topic in class. Students can add to the list and share their findings with other classmates to learn more about that specific topic. Social bookmarking in the classroom can open the door to keeping up to date with current events and historical events. Students can subscribe, on some social bookmarking sites, to an RSS feed to get the most current news on a specific subject.
Social bookmarking is user-friendly therefore educators are more likely to take advantage of this web 2.0 tool and use it in the classroom or for personal use. It takes only a few minutes to sign up with an e-mail address and password. Once signed up, users can export current bookmarks from a personal computer and import them into the social bookmarking site. Now the social bookmarking journey begins (The McGraw-Hill Companies, n.d.).
References:
Department of Education. (2009). Social bookmarking. Retrieved November 07, 2009, from http://www.det.wa.edu.au/education/cmis/eval/curriculum/ict/socialbookmarking/index.htm
Lomas, C. (2005). 7 things you should know about social bookmarking. EDUCAUSE Learning Initiatives. Retrieved from http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7049.pdf
The McGraw-Hill Companies. (n.d.). Teaching today | how-to articles | social bookmarking. Retrieved November 07, 2009, from http://teachingtoday.glencoe.com/howtoarticles/social-bookmarking
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I agree, this site has been a site that I have visited many times before in the past but I did not find as much information as there is posted now. The resources, games, blogs, and lessons for all grade levels are extremely helpful. Glad I went back and revisited the site! There is a ton of web 2.0 tools available on this site!