Sunday, November 25, 2012

Monster Exchange: Great Project Idea...

Monster Exchange is a multidisciplinary, collaborative project that offers high motivtion and authentic, Project-Based Learning that involves both Visual Art and Language Arts. The core activity involves creating a monster and drawing it. Next, students send a narrative description of their monster off to a partner school, where another students will "Re-draw" it from the description. Finally, both versions are scanned and uploaded to the web to be displayed side by side, virtually. A very rich, VERY  21st Centry project... This is good stuff!

Follow the links below:
http://monsterexchange.org/ + http://monsterexchange.org/Featured_Classrooms/featured_classroom.htm (for a sample monster entry) + http://monsterexchange.org/about/about_msdescription.htm (for a full description of the project and how it works)

Digication - Online Portfolios of Art Teachers

Whether an Art educator uses traditional materials or digital resources, having an online presence is something that enriches and empowers one's teaching practice greatly. The NAEA's (National Art Education Association) e-portfolio resource, Digicaton, offers a good example of how this is so, as well as a model for all Art-involved educators in how to conceive and structure their own e-portfolios. And while it is certainly possible to create an e-portfolio without the support of a major organization like NAEA (there are plently of free online web-site, blog, and wiki resources that one can use for this), being part of an extended community as this Digication page demonstrates, offers a wonderful dimension of connection.
 
Follow the link...

Saturday, November 24, 2012

THINK DRAW, An Art Learning Tool With Potential...

Follow the link below to the free, fun resource, Think Draw. This could be viewed as yet another of those cute little ditties, fun little doodle app-thingies...OR it could be a truly valuable tool for learning... It all depends on the way one wraps one's brain around its functions and potential. It seems to me that this could be an easy and engaging item to facilitate learning some important image making basics, things like composition, proportion, etc.

Monday, February 6, 2012

Digital Tools for Visual Art Learning (good ones/free ones)

  1. PANORAMIC STITCHING SOFTWARE
    http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/panoramic-software.htm
  2. PHOTOGRAPHY SOFTWARE
    http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/sw.htm
  3. Pencil (animation software)
    http://www.pencil-animation.org/
  4. 45 Websites For Students To Create Original Artwork Online
    http://mrssmoke.onsugar.com/45-Websites-Students-Create-Original-Artwork-Online-3442983
  5. What's new at FluxTime Studio
    http://www.fluxtime.com/
  6. 10+ Best Free or Open Source Photoshop Alternative Software
    http://www.tripwiremagazine.com/2011/04/10-best-free-or-open-source-photoshop-alternative-software.html
  7. Ten Free Alternatives to MS Paint
    http://www.trickswindows.com/2010/12/ten-free-alternatives-to-ms-paint.html
  8. Art21
    http://www.pbs.org/art21/
  9. Collection of Free Art Tools Found Across the Web, Including 2d / 3d Animation, Drawing, Fonts, Textures, Image Generators
    http://mikeodden.com/online_art_tools.html



Please use the comments feature below to suggest other links

Sunday, February 5, 2012

Readings to Push the Envelope / Visual Art LEARNING

  1. Ten reasons why teaching the arts is critical in a 21st century world
    http://edge.ascd.org/_Ten-reasons-why-teaching-the-arts-is-critical-in-a-21st-century-world/blog/3549601/127586.html
  2. 3D printers give engineering classes a boost: High schools, colleges using rapidly developing technology to illustrate real-world applications of technology lessons http://www.eschoolnews.com/2011/04/22/3d-printers-give-engineering-classes-a-boost/
  3. Object Lessons: Teaching Math Through the Visual Arts, K-5
    http://www.stenhouse.com/shop/pc/viewprd.asp?idProduct=9334
  4. Bringing Art into School, Byte by Byte: Innovative programs use technology to expand access to the arts
    http://www.hepg.org/hel/article/498
  5. Teaching Creativity.... http://people.goshen.edu/~marvinpb/arted/tc.html 

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

"Average is Over" - Art Education Can Be The CURE for AVERAGE

"In a world where average is officially over, there are many things we need to do to buttress employment, but nothing would be more important than passing some kind of G.I. Bill for the 21st century that ensures that every American has access to post-high school education."

Thomas Friedman - January 25, 2012 New York Times Op/Ed piece "Average Is Over"...
This is an important opinion piece, but it doesn't bring the full issue into focus suffiicently. America's schools DO NOT (even attempt to) educate students to be other than average. They educate them to be 'highly effective average' or to excell at a curriculum that aims at a standardized, average body of knowledge. A college education, as Friedman refers to it, represents more of the same - not something different.


Visual Art Education is one area that can be developed to remedy this! It's not  there now. Not only because it is marginalized and offered in dribs and drabs, but because it hasn't been conceived and developed to satisfy the need that Friedman identifies. We've got our work cut out...

See Friedman's piece below

"Op-Ed Columnist

Average Is OverBy THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: January 24, 2012
" In an essay, entitled “Making It in America,” in the latest issue of The Atlantic, the author Adam Davidson relates a joke from cotton country about just how much a modern textile mill has been automated: The average mill has only two employees today, “a man and a dog. The man is there to feed the dog, and the dog is there to keep the man away from the machines.”

Davidson’s article is one of a number of pieces that have recently appeared making the point that the reason we have such stubbornly high unemployment and sagging middle-class incomes today is largely because of the big drop in demand because of the Great Recession, but it is also because of the quantum advances in both globalization and the information technology revolution, which are more rapidly than ever replacing labor with machines or foreign workers.


In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average job, could earn an average lifestyle. But, today, average is officially over. Being average just won’t earn you what it used to. It can’t when so many more employers have so much more access to so much more above average cheap foreign labor, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation and cheap genius. Therefore, everyone needs to find their extra — their unique value contribution that makes them stand out in whatever is their field of employment. Average is over.

Yes, new technology has been eating jobs forever, and always will. As they say, if horses could have voted, there never would have been cars. But there’s been an acceleration. As Davidson notes, “In the 10 years ending in 2009, [U.S.] factories shed workers so fast that they erased almost all the gains of the previous 70 years; roughly one out of every three manufacturing jobs — about 6 million in total — disappeared...”

Read the full article at its source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/25/opinion/friedman-average-is-over.html?_r=1&hp