Amaziograph is a great app for creating beautiful symmetrical patterns but also is a great app for geometry. It costs to date $1.49 but if you are a part of the Apple Volume purchasing programme it will have a 50% discount when buying 20 units or more.
With the new iPads targeted at education, you will be able to use the apple pencil for precision drawing.
You can do
mirror
rotation
2 mirror kaleidoscope
3 mirror kaleidoscope
Use this app to show the line of symmetry, create translational and slide tessellations, create Escher inspired artworks.
I like to create my own graphics and I used to spend hours drawing them on my iPad from scratch. Then I found Adobe Illustrator Draw,
a free app. Gradually I discovered loads of shortcuts that cut down my time in creating. You can upload a photo and draw over the top of it and then bucket fill it. Hide the photo and you have a great looking original graphic. Students love this and those who say they can't draw have a real sense of achievement when they finish their graphic. Now they can make their own cartoons and use their own drawings. They look great in Google Slides and Book Creator. It is a good idea to use a stylus as it gives you more control over your drawing. Here are some examples of mine.
Here is a great tutorial by Tony Vincent that explains the process.
Jane has some fantastic art created by students in her class. I have just discovered a great Photo Montage app called Juxtaposer, so I suggested to her that we could superimpose the children onto the art work. She has decided this would be a great way to do their 'Calendar Art' this year. Calendar Art is a fundraising activity that schools do where they take the children's art and make it into individual calendars that family and friends can buy. The examples below show how it can be done. Jane is going to get her children to dress up as Medieval Characters, take their photos and then superimpose onto photos of their artwork.
I have had a lot of teachers asking me recently how can they use their iPads more creatively with the children. This will be the first of many posts, as teachers ask I will post the ideas I have had. My first question is what topic are you doing?
Topic? Aboriginal Art What apps are on your iPad?
How can you use these apps?
Use Drawing Pad to create your own Aboriginal Art. Choose the black paper and the Felt tip to create patterns.
Share back to your photo album and insert into Keynote, Comic Life, Pages or Book Creator - make a presentation of your own art, some examples of Aboriginal art you have found, information about the art, Safari - Find images via Google, tap and hold on an image to either copy or save to Camera Roll. Don't forget to reference where the images came from.
Comic Life: choose the blank template then choose Collection under the Layout tab and tap on Maps layout, choose Australia and tap the photo icon in the centre of the map to insert your your own art work. Use Text boxes and picture boxes to cover up the parts of the map that shows other countries.
I was asked to work with some Year 2 and 3 children today on writing book reviews. They had read the story on the school Kindles or the Kindle app on the iPad. e-Books can be purchased from Amazon
They had discovered how they could write notes. I saw this as a great opportunity for writing notes myself and leaving 'Think about' questions and comprehension questions on pages for students to look at while reading the book. Students can then add their answers to the note and all of the group can share their understandings through the note feature.
All of these children have Google app accounts so I made a Google Doc template for them to work from. They used computers for the Google Docs as the Drawing elements cannot be edited on an iPad.
We talked about the book and some of the features of the story and then I showed them the template I had shared with them. I took a couple minutes explaining how they could access the different embedded draw items and then we discussed what 'Synopsis, Review and Character Descriptions were.
I had intended them to use the Google Draw tools for their book cover but as we had access to iPads we used the Free version of Crayola Paint and Create. They drew their pictures and emailed them to themselves and then we pasted them into the Draw box. They then used the Google Draw tools to add their Book titles and Author names. Below is Charlotte's work.
A lot of today's session was about getting used to writing and editing in the Google Doc. There was a lot of sharing of ideas and 'how to do things' amongst the group. The next time we work on this template with a new book we will look more closely at the content the students write.
Artrage in one of my most favourite art drawing programmes on both the iPad, iPhone/iPod Touch and the computer, and it was created by Kiwis!
Art Rage for the iPhone/iPod Touch (NZ $2.59) Account: No account necessary for apps Saving: Saves to the app Sharing options: Send to Photos, iTunes, email, Facebook, Dropbox or Print
Artrage has a variety of tools, different types of brushes. The wide brush adds real thick paint effects and the thin brush paints like water colour.
As well as using Artrage for the obvious, painting and drawing, there is nice feature that is included in the Computer Artrage as well.
You can upload a photo so it appears transparent and draw over the top. The example below shows the pencil with the photo in the background, to the right without the photo.
Drawn with pencil showing the transparent photo
To the right is an example of the other tools
How could you use this in the classroom?
Students can take photos with their camera and upload to Artrage.
Take portrait photos and use the pencil or pen tool to outline the shapes, remove the photo and print out and finish in pencil or pen
take scenery or object photos, use the pen tool to outline main lines of the photo, remove photo and print out, finish off in paint
Some photo apps can be purely gimmicky, but they can also have their uses in education. This is the first post in a series of Photo apps and effects.
My Sketch (iPad and iPod Touch) Add Effects: Smudge, Contrast, Photocopy, Colour, Sepia, Smooth, Canvas, Classic, Fine Pencil, Sketchbook, Pastel and many others Share: Saves to Photo Library, or share to email
Take a photo or use one from the library
Choose an effect from below, if you don't like it, tap the back button
Play with the brightness and contrast and any other editing tools that might appear
Tap Save, choose image size
Tap on Save to photo library or send in an email
How could you use this in education?
This app will provide you with lots of different ways to sketch. Children can take photos of the subject and apply the sketching filters to it. Then they can look closely it at and observe the form, shape, shadows and how the strokes have been applied. This will help them for when they attempt their own sketching on paper.
Students and teachers can waste a lot of time looking for Apps. They need to be categorised and organised into folders.
Set up 'curriculum' pages.
Maths
These could be set up into strand, stages and/or Number Knowledge and Number Strategies.
Students should be directed to the folders that are related to the teaching and learning intention of that day.
Writing Literacy needs to split up into at least Reading and Writing. Depending on how many apps you have you may split it even further to have a Spelling and Grammar page. In this example I like to have a separate folder that offers many different ways to publish.
Reading In this example the books have been divided up into Junior and Senior Books. You may want to consider reading ages as folder names. I have separated the 'interactive' books such as Mushroom Age or The Mystery of the Crystal Porter as they have less reading and more interactive tasks in them.
Music
I have divided up the music apps into the different categories of
Wind
Percussion
Strings
Singing
Piano
Art
There are so many wonderful art apps available. I have separated the drawing ones from the apps that do special effects.
The other curriculum apps like Social Sciences and Science can be divided up between pages as well.
I saw @mrwoodnz tweet about Post-it -Wars and then I read his blog post. I was confused until I read the link to the herald story about Post-it-Wars in France. It is a corporate 'collage' war using Post-it notes stuck to windows. Have a look at the 20 photos on the Herald page.
Shaun had created his own Post-it-War using Linoit which enabled him to use different colour Post-its. I tried it out, it is not as easy as it looks.
Sticky Notes on Win7 worked quite well and was quite quick to create notes but there is a limit of notes, so use wisely.
iCardSort (Free or NZ $8.29 ) is an iPad app that was easy to use and didn't seem to have a limit on sticky notes.
There are only two weeks left until the end of the school year in New Zealand,
so it is time to start thinking about Christmas activities we could do with the students in our classes. Even though Christmas is during Summer we still adopt a lot of the Northern Hemisphere traditions and teach them in our classes. One noteable case last Christmas was showing the teacher of the bi-lingual Tongan unit how to make paper snowflakes online and offline!
The next few posts are going to concentrate on Christmas activities you can do in the classroom using computers.
Twelve Days of Christmas
This was a favourite activity I did with students every Christmas where we would
students could draw or paint pictures, take photos of final products
or use online programmes to create drawings such as Sketchfu ( need to set up an account, click on Download to see image and screen capture or print); Odopod is more suitable for older students, drawings look like watercolours; Sumo is more suitable for older children as it has quite comprehensive tools; Artpad is a simplistic art tool suitable for all ages, take screen captures of finished art work
other programmes that could be used are PhotoStory 3 (Windows only), Moviemaker (Windows) or iMovie (Mac) Insert photos, record voices or add a music track to create movie.
Inspiration or Kidspiration could be used for the mindmapping of the ideas and publishing as well. Both Kidspiration and Inspiration can be hyperlinked to websites, Inspiration can also have movies embedded on the page.
ComicLife is also another easy way to publish students work. Use their drawings or photograph artwork and add it to the comic.(If you are using images from online don't forget to reference!)
If you don't have ComicLife then use the Autoshapes in Word
A simple but fun activity for all ages is building a picture in Kerpoof and adding text, you can search for graphics and make it as unusual as you like. Print it orscreen capture it when finished.
Of course the ever popular Wordle should not be left out. Adding a Tilde ~ in between each word will allow phrases to appear. This is when children need to learn how to copy and paste as there is a lot of repetition going on.
Themes
Different themes could be decided on. There are different schools of thought on the original meaning of the song. Here are some ideas for themes that could be used
characters and settings from a fairy tale or favourite book
indigenous items from the child's country of origin
favourite sports (teams)
international themes such as Global Warming, Third World countries, Disasters
based on a Social Studies/Science topic studied that year
presents they would like for Christmas
presents they would like to give for Christmas
based on people in the school/classroom
based on a favourite movie (See the youtube movies below)
look through a current magazine or newspaper
write about noteable school or personal events
How about a non-Christmas theme?
There maybe some students in your class who do not celebrate Christmas so they could have a theme about the holidays. I saw a great book in a classroom a few days ago called 'The Twelve Days of Holidays'. This is written from the mother's perspective as she is increasingly getting 'fed up' with her children at home during the holidays. Students could write about
the holiday they are going to have
their best holiday
their worst holiday
their dream holiday
or from the perspective of a member of their family
Other versions of 'The Twelve Days of Christmas' that can be viewed that could motivate students are the following
this one is a slideshow with pictures (paintings) of each day
This next Youtube movie is a good example of how you can create your own Twelve days of Christmas on a particular theme, in this case on Disney stories.
This version will appeal to Shrek fans. This is a great theme to use picking out characters in the movie.
And if you want to see the lyrics have a look at this Youtube movie
For more advanced ideas of presenting the twelve days of Christmas which could be embedded into Blogs and wikis...
Wallwisher: Add posts to the wall, could be an individual wall or a collaborative wall
Glogster a poster yourself application enables you to embed graphics, movies and link to websites.
Create an online book
Mixbook has some great Christmassy templates. Students can publish their Twelve Days of Christmas in Mixbook and then embed into their wiki or blog (for free). They can also be purchased from $6.99 US and sent to you.
There are a lot more online ways of presenting 'The Twelve Days of Christmas', for more ideas look at
'Do it instead of'...rather then 'As Well As' That is my new motto. Part of the problem when integrating ICT into teaching and learning is that teachers are treating it as an add on! In some cases there are still classrooms that are operating with only one computer and/or another one barely working but most schools I visit nowadays have between 2-4 computers in their class. Think of this Instead of giving your reading or maths group a worksheet, create the worksheet in Kidspiration, Inspiration, Word, PowerPoint (or whatever you would like to use). Make one child in the group the mouse operator, one the keyboard, one writing on a whiteboard, one on a calculator or anything else you can think of, then the children can swap. You can have at least 3 children on one computer. So instead of writing on a worksheet they are working together using the computer. Another example where this works well is in Art. Whatever the children are doing in art, someone can be doing the same thing using the computer. Artrage has pencil, paintbrush, crayon, felt tip and pastel tools. Experiment with the pencil and you can even do shading! A teacher once said to me "we are doing weaving, how can we use the computer to create a woven pattern?" My answer was 'use Word or PowerPoint with autoshapes and colours'. Find graphics with textures and weave with them. Children will learn a lot of computer skills and use a lot of problem solving doing this type of exercise.
The other important thing to remember is that not everyone in the class has to do that same activity on the computer, maybe in art this week it is this group of children, next week it is another group of children with maybe a different computerised art activity and so on.
Martha's art lesson is all about portraits. She had thought about the children doing something using the computer. I suggested she use Artrage. There are some wonderful youtube movies that demonstrate drawings and paintings being created in Artrage.These movies are great motivators to show children how art can be created using software.
Another feature of Artrage is the ability to import photos into Artrage, by clicking on the Tracing button (0r add tracing image in the older versions), navigate and find where your photo is saved (for portrait photos ensure that the face fills most of the photo).
Use the pencil tool and set pressure high, softness and tilt angle low and draw around the outline. Remove the photo by clicking Tools- Tracing options - Clear Tracing Image. This can then be printed out, photocopied up to A3 and use what ever medium you choose to finish off the art piece.
Or maybe for some of those children who have those highly developed intrapersonal and visual spatial skills (and time) let them use the painting tool to finish the painting in full.
This programme is updated regularly so make sure that you download the free updates. The instructions in this post relate to version 2.5.20
Patsy has set up an innovative way of using ICT to assess her children's art work. She takes photos of the progression of her Year 0-1 children's art work. The children make comments and these are collected and kept in individual manila folders.
Once the children have finished their art work she adds a copy of one of their progression examples to the art piece.
Amaziograph is a great app for creating beautiful symmetrical patterns but also is a great app for geometry. It costs to date $1.49 but if you are a part of the Apple Volume purchasing programme it will have a 50% discount when buying 20 units or more.
