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!

Final presentation for AHA4096 Photography for Educators

Renaissance Photoshop Project from KarenBlumberg

I try to take a course every semester at Teachers College. This is because it’s one of the best perks of being an employee of Columbia University, I like continually developing myself as a professional, and it’s fun to learn new things. This semester, I’m taking Photography for Educators with Sean Justice.

Besides taking, organizing, editing,and printing photos, we set for ourselves a few semester-long goals. I had five:

1. To fine-tune an integrated project joining conversations about Renaissance art, Art History, and media literacy. This project incorporated discussions about the history of image manipulation starting with how painted portraits were idealized versions of the subject and also how photographs were manipulated early on even before Photoshop. We also talk about ownership of da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, which is not under copyright, and variations of the Mona Lisa by other artists which are under copyright (and variations about copyright based on country of origin). We discuss Shepard Fairey’s Hope poster in depth to encourage students to think about ownership, fair use, copyright, licensing, and attribution. And throughout it all, we teach 6th graders how to use basic tools in Photoshop (the eraser, selection, opacity, paint, eyedropper, magic wand, etc.) to alter a Renaissance painting.

2. To share my passion (soap box) for being ethical online. Hence, I shared a slide show about how to search and cite Creative Commons-licensed media (License to Cull). Also to encourage people to look at the Terms and Conditions of websites and apps, and to consider where they put their work (is it public or less public, do you own it still or are you offering your work up freely to websites and not paying attention to how your work is being used).

3. To share my Flickr stream and think about ways to use Flickr groups to build community. I set up a group AHA4096 and had hoped to have people connect with each other and each other’s photos in a shared space.

4. To impress upon teachers the importance of gathering a portfolio of their work via a blog or website. Thus, I’m housing my slideshow at Slideshare.net, and embedding it here at the top of this post. I treat this site as a museum of my work, rather than a warehouse where I house all my stuff (like my Google Drive).

5. To learn some awesome new tips and tricks for using Photoshop. I learned how to crop, set guidelines, and format my stuff for printing. I’m a big fan of straight-out-of-camera photography. Up until now, I rarely edited or printed my photos. This class really opened up my eyes to other possibilities besides shooting and sharing on Flickr.

6th graders are sharing their Renaissance Photoshop projects

6th graders are uploading their finished Renaissance Photoshop collages to a shared album on The Gallery (our online photo repository powered by Drupal). I chose a few to include here. Katelin O’Hare and I are pretty pleased with the results.

We asked each student to write a reflection about the project on their personal digital portfolios. These are Google Sites that they curate and maintain for multiple years. Each academic year has its own Announcements Page on the site, and they add Posts for each artifact/description they include.

“Image Manipulation” slideshow used to launch our 6th grade Renaissance Photoshop project

Image Manipulation Intro from KarenBlumberg

Katelin O’Hare and I are meeting with the 6th grade Art classes this week to introduce our Renaissance Photoshop project where students locate a Renaissance painting and layer themselves into it. In the past we’ve used Dove’s Evolution of Beauty campaign video to kick-off a discussion about image manipulation. This year, I gathered examples from additional resources, news stories, and ad campaigns.

Three noted moments from the ensuing conversation:
1. When looking at examples of image manipulation in advertising and fashion magazines, one 6th grader came up with the analogy: “Photoshop is to models what steroids is to athletes.” This spawned a really interesting discussion.
2. When asked where they should start their search for images of Renaissance paintings to use for their project (before we introduced Artstor), many students called out Google! One child then piped in, “The problem with Google, is that you don’t know if the images you locate will be an authentic image or an altered one.”
3. When asked why Artstor rightfully charges for a subscription to their amazing digital repository of art, one child said it was because, “They take really big photos of paintings and then host them on their computers and let us download them. It’s like iTunes for artwork. That costs money.”