Love the final photo project my 8th graders made to represent Diversity at @The_School! #artsed #edchat

The 8th graders at The School at Columbia University engage in an amazing multi-month unit where they choose, research, and design a Social Action Project. Two of my favorite girls asked me to help them produce a mural to showcase the incredible diversity (and cuteness) of our school community. I sheparded them to every classroom (K-8) in the building and supervised their photo shoots. We had the kids pose with both “yearbook smiles” and goofy faces. After, the 8th graders chose the best images from their files and used iPhoto to crop and print 3″x3″ prints. They arranged them on a row of poster boards and placed a border declaring “We are One!” around the perimeter.

Showing 6th graders how to independently maintain their Digital Art Portfolios on The Social Network.

See the full gallery on Posterous

6th graders in Yoshiko Maruiwa’s art classes are adding a sub-page to their Digital Art Portfolios on our Elgg social network (we named it The Social Network four years ago). Yoshiko and I want the students to be able to archive their work and maintain their portfolio independently. Hopefully, they will continue to do so for the remainder of the year and into 7th and 8th grades. We also talked about having a physical portfolio of their work and one that exists in the cloud.

I had each class for an hour. These were my instructions:

1. Take a good photo. Without flash if possible. From a straight and center vantage point and not too high/low/left/right.

2. Upload photo to iPhoto and crop/edit/enhance as needed.

3. Add their image to the class album on The Gallery. (The Gallery is our in-house photo server powered by Drupal.)

4. Copy the URL of the full-size image.

5. In a new tab, login to The Social Network. (The Social Network is our in-house social network powered by Elgg.)

6. Create a sub-page in their Digital Art Portfolio.

7. Insert the image by pasting the URL, adjust the dimensions of the image, add border and padding if desired. We talked about how the basic WYSIWYG toolbar is “supposed” to be idiot-proof.

8. Awesome trick by a 6th grader: Remove the last digit of the height and the width to quickly resize the picture.

9. In the body of their page, next to their image, write an Artist Statement about their piece: Discuss what it represents, the colors and design chosen, the process…

10. Add tags as needed : 6th Grade, art, portfolio, painting, self-portrait, mosaic…

11. When finished, comment on their classmates’ pieces. We reinforced appropriate commenting:

Not so great – “I like your painting!”
Great – “I like your use of color and symmetry.”
Really great – “I like how you painted your guitar. Do you play any other instruments?”

In each session, we had three stations and a pile of cameras available for the kids to take a picture of their art piece. After, a student was at the front of the room demo-ing on the classroom iMac while everone was at their personal MacBooks following along or going at their own pace. Having a gaggle of cameras, enough download wires, and 1:1 laptops was awesome but not necessary.

It’s so easy being green(screened) with iMovie ’09.

I recently finished a combined Art/English project with 6th grade. The year-long theme of How History Shapes My Identity is explored using the core concepts Analysis, Understanding, and Memory. Students wrote a brief “About Me” piece in English with Marisa Guastaferro, practiced delivering it orally, and wrote bulleted talking points on a note card (rather than read the essay verbatim).

Next, Yoshiko Maruiwa, 6th grade Art teacher, helped set-up three different filming stations with a stretch of green construction paper taped to the wall, a tripod, and a Flip Camera. Note: We actually have a giant green/blue screen that I unfolded once (!) before bunching it back and replacing it on a top shelf. It’s huge and heavy and the green paper (or even a monochromatic wall) is way easier to manage.

While waiting for their turn in front of the Flip camera, students were asked to locate and cite three defining images from the web or from their own albums. If searching with Google, students were instructed to perform an Advanced Search to locate a) large images and b) freely shared images. They then dragged these images into iPhoto and copied/ pasted the image URLs for future reference.

The USB arm on the Flip Camera (which @bkolani complained about recently) make it a cinch to upload the video to the kids’ MacBooks. (We’re a 1:1 school from grades 2-8.) Students imported their footage into iMovie, and trimmed a few seconds of awkward pre-teen dead air at the beginning and end of the footage as necessary.

iMovie’s Green Screen tool is ridiculously easy to use. (Verify first that Show Advanced Tools is checked in iMovie’s Preferences.) The most important thing is to remind students that order matters, and an easy mnemonic device is Photos First. Students imported their three images from iPhoto using the Photo Browser tool in iMovie and dragged the images onto the Project staging area. Based on the length of their video, they had to adjust the clip duration of each photo (the default seems to be 4 seconds) so that the photos and the videos were the same length of time.

Then, students simply grabbed the entire video clip and dragged it over and near the beginning of the first photo in their Project area. A menu popped up that offered Green Screen. Ta-da! We sometimes needed to tweak the green or blue gain with the sliding scales in the video inspector (they had to double click on the video clip to open this menu). But otherwise, the videos came out really well (technologically). The kids exported their m4v files to the desktop, used Quicktime to save as a .mov, and uploaded their finished movies to our in-house video server (powered by Drupal). They then pasted the embed code onto their profiles on our in-house social network (powered by Elgg) and commented on each other’s orations and video stylings.  Done and done.

See the full gallery on Posterous