Slides from my #FETC presentation, “License to Cull: Art History, Media Literacy, Ethics and Photoshop”

This integrated unit evolved over time and was co-taught with the 6th grade Art teachers (first Yoshiko Maruiwa, and then Katelin O’Hare). It examines fine art and the fine print. Students learn about ownership, copyright, licensing, media literacy, fair use, Creative Commons, Wikimedia and Photoshop.

Future of Education Technology Conference (FETC)
Orange County Convention Center Expo Hall
1/15/16, 11:00am – 12:00pm

Presenting “License to Cull” with @oharebros and @NewYork564 in Room 124 at 2:30! @The_School #ISTE2015 #artsed

  Super honored to be presenting License to Cull: Art History, Media Literacy, Ethics and Photoshop with my stellar art colleagues, Yoshiko Maruiwa and Katelin O’Hare from the The School at Columbia University.

We’ll share an integrated unit that examines fine art and the fine print. Students learn about ownership, copyright, licensing, media literacy, fair use, Creative Commons, Wikimedia and Photoshop.

See our slides full of links and resources below:

As part of the 6th grade integrated study of the Renaissance in English, Social Studies, Science, Art, Music, and Wellness, we designed a Photoshop unit where students locate a Renaissance painting and layer themselves into it as either the main character or an additional character. While we teach the basics of Photoshop, we also facilitate rich discussions about a variety of topics including ownership, copyright, licensing, fair use, and the public domain. Our students use their assigned laptops to research, collaborate, and create throughout the unit. We discuss the Mona Lisa’s various owners and examine a variety of copyrightable contributions that have been made to Leonardo da Vinci’s original art from multiple artists over the years. We read the fine print and Terms of Use for Google Art Project and Artstor. We talk about how Photoshop is utilized to manipulate most images on advertisements and in magazines and how that affects body image and society’s standard of beauty. We discuss ways to locate fair-use art and dissect licenses from Creative Commons to encourage respectful and ethical use of others’ artistic creations. Further, we discuss the lawsuit between the Associated Press and Shepard Fairey over Fairey’s Barack Obama Hope poster. After completing their Photoshop collage, the students added their images to a shared online album. Additionally, students included their work on their digital art portfolios where they were expected to write an “artist statement” for their piece and comment on their classmates’ creations.

Stop Motion animations inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches in 6th Art with @oharebros. #artsed

Katelin O’Hare (@oharebros) teaches 6th art and was interested in doing an end of year tech project. Katelin led a stop-motion unit with 8th grade in the fall, and she considered trying it out with 6th grade as well. I suggested using Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches as inspiration, since 6th grade was finishing up their unit on The Renaissance: Romeo and Juliet in English, debates about Galileo and Copernicus in Social Studies, Golden Ratios in Math, etc…

We had the students locate hi-res images of da Vinci’s work on Artstor.org, as Columbia University offers a subscription to their community members, and we are allowed to download files for educational purposes. We had a spirited discussion about copyright, terms of service, and fair use.

Students created a storyboard using post-its on a large sheet of paper in order to detail the key frames of their short film. They were tasked with shooting a minimum of 10 seconds at 10 frames per second (100 frames). They used brads, string, sticks, and wire to make the tiny movements of their paper cut-outs. Some of their finished shorts are below. Enjoy!

Photos of our 8th grade @InsideOutProj installation at @The_School:

I loved collaborating with Kim Lane, Katelin O’Hare, Lindsay Calhoun, and Yoshiko Maruiwa on our 3rd annual Inside Out Project with the 8th graders at The School at Columbia University. More info about our See, Hear, Speak! theme is in this post: https://karenblumberg.wordpress.com/2014/04/21/insideout2014/

Students were asked to write a press release for the project and installation. There words are pasted below and archived on The School’s website here: http://theschool.columbia.edu/node/1584

Exhibition on View Monday, May 5 – Tuesday, June 10
The School at Columbia University, 556 West 110th Street, 5th floor windows

April 24, 2014 – New York, NY
In the next week, a new addition to Broadway will appear. Students at The School at Columbia University are participating in the Inside Out project and displaying photographs of their faces as a way of combatting injustices they see.

The soon-to-graduate eighth graders chose a theme to portray through their portraits. Their theme for this project was to “See, Hear, and Speak.” Their goal was to fight against injustice, and they wanted to do that through photography and art. The project is a showcase of black and white photographs of each and every eighth-grader (and their teachers) posing. Their poses stand for either seeing, hearing, or speaking. To see, hear, and speak really is how they thought to best tackle the injustices in the world. This project is their first of many having to do with injustice and speaking out.

This project is part of the larger Inside Out project, coordinated by the French artist JR, started three years ago after he won the TED Prize for his photography installations. His work started as a signal to raise awareness around riots going on in Paris in 2004, then soon escalated to much more than that. Armed with just a 28-millimeter lens, JR then decided to travel to Israel and Palestine to photograph Palestinians and Israelis of the same profession, then post pictures on the wall separating them from one another. He then went on to photograph women in poor neighborhoods (a project called “Women Are Heroes”) to empower them and to make the neighborhood more beautiful. He has three current projects: “Unframed,” “The Wrinkles of the City,” and “Inside Out,” where he takes ordinary people’s photographs and turns them into works of art and social action.

The installation will be put up this week. The images will be displayed on the windows of The School’s art studio, printed on 2 x 3 foot posters. There will be over 60 portraits directly facing Broadway. Come and look at their portraits on the corner of 110th and Broadway, and get inspired to see, hear, or speak!

And finally… We were highlighted on the Inside Out Project’s Instagram feed!!!
Click to see it here: http://i.instagram.com/p/nymZs7RAd0/