Technology: 3D Printers and 3D Pens are beyond incredible. Make virtually anything you want and make it 3D. Imagine it, design it, and make it with no middle man. Want to make a replica of the White House? Either design it yourself using Google SketchUp, or download someone else's plan off of the website thingiverse, send it to your Makertbot 3D Printer and watch it appear before your eyes between 45minutes and a few hours. The 3D Pen has even more freedom in that it requires no plans and you are creating your design with your own hands. Watch quick videos of both technologies below: Makerbot 3D Printer:
3Doodler Pen:
Classroom Use: As for using these in the classroom, the grand idea is having a classroom set of iPads with 123D Sculpt and Google SketchUp that the whole class can use at once to create 3D designs that they will then print to one of the 10 printers in the classroom. Students can have basic requirements (create a building, design a monument) that they fulfill with their own designs and then print. As for the Pens... students can fulfill any number of project requirements through drawing three dimensionally!
Technology: In my middle school, nearly every single student has some kind of device whether it be a smartphone or a tablet. These devices have messaging, cameras/photo storing, apps and internet browsers at the bare minimum.
Classroom Use: One of the main reasons I want to students to use devices in the classroom is to have the ability to research and look at resource images whenever they want. This would allow students a greater wealth of resources as well as individual use of resources. As well, students could download apps such as Three Ring to document their own work and submit it to my three ring classroom for grading. Twitter has a neat little quirk where anyone can follow a public twitter account by simply having text messaging ability. This would allow me to send brief messages to my students regarding class or fun art facts.
Technology: iPads and all of the iOS software are built for designers and art related endeavors. Apple is constantly releasing new apps that allow users to create designs and various types of art. 123D Sculpt allows students to sculpt virtual clay into any shape imaginable as well as starting from an already designed sculpture (an elephant or human head for instance) and adjusting the shapes of the clay form. Adobe even has elements versions of their creative suite available on iPads that would allow students to edit photographs in Adobe Photoshop Express and create digital designs in Adobe Ideas.
Adobe Ideas
Adobe Photoshop Express
123D Sculpt
Classroom Use: With a classroom set of iPads and technology, students would create digital art on any of the above apps. The three apps above cover sculpture/ceramics, design and photography and would be able to encompass a wide variety of art standards.
Technology: Three Ring is the newest way to keep a portfolio and it is digital and streamlined. Teachers can start accounts and create their own classes complete with each student listed within the class. Three Ring makes it easy to add students to a class: simply copy your class roster, paste it into the input section of a new class and Three Ring automatically separates and makes a spot for each individual student. Once classes are created, teachers can upload images of student work directly to each student's space. Three Ring even has mobile apps which allow teachers to take pictures form their phone and upload directly without having to go through the computer/actual website. Extra benefit.... students can download Three Ring themselves and upload directly to your account!
Three Ring Website
Three Ring Mobile Site
Classroom Use: Next year, I plan to pilot using Three Ring with an entire class. I plan to have students download Three Ring on their own devices (unless they do not have their own which is rare) and document and upload their own projects when they finish. I see this as a way to help speed along grading which in turn would bring quicker feedback to my students.
Technology: Newsela is brilliant! Newsela is a wonderful website that takes news articles from a wide variety of sources on a wide variety of topics and introduces them to students at a range of lexile reading levels. The reader can change the lexile level and the article will adjust in word usage, and sentence and paragraph structure. The content stays the same but the difficulty of the article adjusts per the level chosen. In addition, some of these articles have quizzes attached to them which allow students to answer questions about the article they've just read. In addition, teachers can set up classes that allow teachers to send articles directly to students and check their progress after. Articles are filtered through one of seven categories - War & Peace, Science, Kids, Money, Law, Health and Arts - and are updated at least once a week. Below is a view of an article about a Jackson Pollock painting Mural which shows you the basic setup of every Newsela Article.
Classroom Use: I would like to use Newsela as an enhancement to my classroom. I envision something called "Five Minute Fridays" where every Friday I pull up an arts article on Newsela on the SmartBoard and the class reads through and discusses the article. Then, as a class, we take the Newsela Quiz. This would be a easy way to introduce students to art beyond the classroom as well as cross interdisciplinary with Language Arts and depending on the article contents, potentially history and science as well.
Come on art teachers, I'm sure you've heard it somewhere. The proverbial "what's suddenly wrong with paint and markers?" from someone who has no idea what we art teachers are trying to do in our classrooms. We are trying to educate our students in the multitude of ways our students can create art and we are given such a small window of time to do so since we are not a "core" class. Unfortunately, some of our colleagues are hearing similar sentiments even in their core classes as administrators are having trouble moving past the hefty price tag necessary to introduce technology into classrooms. Since many of us educators are hearing that reply, articles like the one below are becoming more and more abundant. We as an education system in the United States are falling below other countries in our hesitancy to provide ample technology to our students. And so, we are tasked in every classroom to find ways to ready our students for the future without the proper tools. In an ideal world, every district would have plenty of funding for every classroom to have technology needed to work through lessons that would push our students to succeed in the future. This blog is a dream for an art room in a district that has an abundance of funding and a hunger for putting technology in our students hands!
