When you are finished with other work you may click this button for some Holiday fun!
A wonderful new tool has been added to abcya.com to help students create animations! Students were quickly able to jump in and start a project. There were a few glitches but for a free resource it is fabulous. Not only can you draw anything with a variety of color options there are also text, shape, and image tools! Here are a few examples from upper elementary students.
The computer lab has been working hard to bring spring in these last few weeks! It started with rainbows for St. Patrick's Day and now we've had beautiful butterflies across our screens!
We are a 1:1 district for 3rd through high school and I am always looking for new ideas to be creative with our devices especially since this is MY first year teaching in the lab! All this "butterfly business" started when I found this post on Tricia Fuglestad's blog! The timing was great as one of our Art teachers had just been doing pointillism butterflies with first graders AND we have a local butterfly garden that one school's first graders would visit for a spring field trip! So even though this project would be for older grades this led to the idea of keeping the first graders involved at this specific school. Since our first graders don't have iPads I connected with teachers of older grades who are matched up as reading buddies for the first grade students. I asked them to have the older student take a green screen photo of their buddy during their regular buddy time. This was a HUGE help in saving us time during our weekly 30 minutes in the lab! We began our work for this project by practicing drawing the wings using tux paint on our computers. This program has a symmetry tool and even though it's slightly different than the app's symmetry tool we would use it gave them a chance to get the feel for drawing a mirrored image. This also helped give me time to get the necessary apps installed on our iPads during this same class session. (At this time I have to run around and enter a password for all 25+ students in every class!) We studied the photo of real butterfly wings from Tricia's website for inspiration and discussed the symmetry we noticed and the unique details! That could have been the end of the lesson right there as THESE butterflies were AMAZING! Be sure to press play for the two Flipagrams I quickly created so you can hear the perfect songs I found!
Install the Flipagram app for an easy way to share digital work in its true form! I quickly snapped a shot of students' screens and threw them in the app with a FREE 30 second music clip included right in the app!
The best part was that I never got tired of hearing the excitement in the lab as they learned how easy it was to change the whole mood of the butterfly with a few clicks on the magic paint bucket tool! They were all so unique and colorful and amazing!
In our next class session we were ready to start using the FREE SketchbookX app to make our wings we would use for the finished piece. Getting students used to the tools in this app was a little tricky at first. We had to learn how to choose colors, brushes, click the symmetry tool and SAVE.
Thirty minute class sessions go by quickly so we got as far as we could!
We were planning to use Keynote's instant alpha tool as the best free option in place of the Superimpose app Tricia had used. After much searching I found a fabulous free app (except I think it has since gone to a paid only version) called PW lite photowizard photoeditor. And it coincidentally has a butterfly on the app icon which helped students remember it!
The app let us mask the green screen image and save it to the camera roll for smashing with our SketchbookX wings!
In SketchbookX we started by getting our wings ready to edit. We added a layer and learned about how important that step was to be able to place and size the body image! We practiced inserting images from our camera roll, using the transform tool, manipulating with a two finger pinch/zoom, and the again SAVING our final work!
These were a lot of steps to manage in our short time together but once a few got through to the end they were able to help each other better. The absolute final step for students was uploading the image to our shared google drive folder for printing! Now, after spending many hours downloading the images to my home computer out of google drive so that I can upload them to a photo printing site, I'm anxious to search for a faster method! In between organizing and uploading folders for each class I also started playing around with the masked version of final butterflies to create an animated garden using the DoInk Animation App! After I created the video and saved it to my camera roll I imported it into imovie to add one of three fun butterfly songs I found! Mariah Carey- Butterfly Little Mix-Wings Miley Cyrus-Butterfly Fly Away These students are now getting ready to "Fly Up" to the next grade as we are wrapping up the year! What a fun project to remember in the lab!
This was one of my favorite projects as it filled the lab with bright cheery rainbows after a long hard winter! I modeled different tools and step by step ideas to create rainbows and leprechauns with a pot of gold too! This tied right in with a recent art lesson learning the ROY G. BIV colors of the rainbow! So sweet!
Watching the process of this Kindergarten art inspired me to take this video!
It's a little shaky but I used time lapse to quickly show how Rylee created her piece!
My example for students is the first picture. I'm practicing ways to share creative projects for younger students and flipagram worked wonderfully! I quickly took a photo of student screens on my iphone then easily created a flipagram! I even found the perfect music in the library of FREE 30 second music clips within the app!
I just LOVE seeing their work in true form with all the bright colors. It's never quite the same when printed in black and white! Flipagram makes it easy for the students and their parents to enjoy again and again! 5th grade classes (and some 4th) worked on writing book reviews for March is Reading Month! They used a google document to type their review which became their script for creating a Tellagami video! Tellagami is an app which creates an avatar to speak on your screen. In Tellagami they imported a picture of the cover of the book to use as the background. They placed their avatar on the screen and recorded their review!
After saving their work they uploaded it to a google drive folder. This way the video will be saved safely but it also let them have the option to create a QR code for others to easily view their video! Can't wait to see all the finished work! |
AuthorThird year as a K-5 tech teacher in a 1:1 district. Technology is my passion! Archives
December 2016
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