Instructify

BY REBECCAH HAINES

Do you ever sit around and think to yourself, “Gosh, those people in the government sure don’t know what they’re doing! I could do so much better”? Well, Challenge.gov gives you a chance to take a crack at solving some issues, and even winning prizes.

The premise of the site is to get the public involved as a partner with the government to work on current issues like healthier school lunches, disaster preparedness, and helping the environment. There are tons of challenges you can browse, but here are a few of particular interest to educators:

1. Balloonsat High Altitude Flight Student Competition — This is a challenge for high school students to design a flight experiment or technology demonstration that, if chosen, will be sent to the stratosphere by NASA in a High Altitude Balloon. This competition is almost over, but if students can work quickly, there is still time for a submission.  NASA’s details on the guidelines for the competition can be found here. Submissions due February 11, 2011.
2. Calendar Cover Contest for womenshealth.gov — This challenge requests submissions of art for the 2012 Women’s Health calendar. High school art students may be an appropriate audience for this challenge. Giving students a real-world reason for doing a project usually motivates them to do a good job, and the prize of having nationally published art may just inspire them. Submissions due February 28, 2011.
3. It’s My Environment Video Project — This challenge, sponsored by the EPA, requests 10-second videos of people taking action to help the environment where they live. In your video, you must say or put up a sign that says “It’s My Environment,” and the best of the video submissions will be stitched together into more lengthy compilations. This one would definitely be fun for your students to do! Not only would they be submitting a video for the competition, in order to do so, they’d have to be out in the community serving the environment. Submissions due April 15, 2011.

If none of these current competitions strikes your fancy, keep checking the website. More challenges will be posted as various government agencies come up with problems for which they’d like public input.

Challenge.gov

Related stuff

Google Science Fair launches January 11

Discover what’s in your community by playing InterroBang

Solving global environmental issues: Something to SHOUT about!

Brooklyn Space Program sends video camera to space for science

BY CHRISTOPHER PANNA

You may not find comic books in every kid’s backpack anymore, but the medium of comics still attracts young audiences as sure as trouble waits for Batman around each corner. These comic-creating sites are easy to use, require no registration, and will have students crafting visual stories in no time. Choose the background and characters, insert speech bubbles, and POW!! Your very own comic.

Write Comics: This site features amusingly drawn characters and common backgrounds like houses, schools, and city streets. It could work well for scenes of everyday life.

Strip Generator (pictured): This one has no backgrounds and simple black & white characters, but offers props to insert like furniture, toys, and food. Still, the basic artwork here puts your focus on the text.

Witty Comics: The stuffy characters on this site are offset by the backgrounds featuring famous landmarks from around the world. What would two people talk about as they stood among ancient Greek ruins?

Hero Machine: Here you create a single superhero instead of a comic strip. You can customize almost every aspect of his/her features and costume. Adverb Man? Geometry Girl?

Designing comics helps students learn to communicate with both words and pictures. This can be tied to any subject by giving students a clear objective for the comic, such as a topic for the characters to discuss or a certain message for the strip to convey.

Write Comics

Strip Generator

Witty Comics

Hero Machine

Related stuff

ToonDoo makes creating comic strips easy

No Artistic Skills Needed: Make Beliefs Comix

Pixton: Digital Storytelling, Comics-style

BY KEVIN HODGSON

There is always something to be said about simplicity, particularly when you are working with technology and younger students. This Is Sand is an ideal art tool for elementary students to create virtual sand sculptures. At first glance, thought, the site appears to be nothing more than a blank screen. But with a left click of the mouse, digital sand starts dropping from the cursor on the screen. Click the “C” button on your keyboard, and now you have a vast array of sand colors to choose from. In no time, This is Sand will have your attention as you slowly layer in colors. (When you are at the site, notice the small unobtrusive gray box in the upper left corner of the screen — this is the instruction manual.)

I was introduced to This Is Sand by my kindergarten-teaching colleague, who uses the site on the first day she introduces her students to our school’s Mac laptops. (See her video documentary of her students’ first day with the Macs.) The site’s artistic nature and user-friendly interface makes This Is Sand a great place to begin classroom instruction for younger students as they learn the mechanics of using a computer mouse to navigate a screen, finding letters on the keyboard, and choosing colors from a palette. The learning has less to do with the building of sand castles than with the computer literacy that comes with using the site.

The site defaults to making a neat little sound as the sand falls (you can turn off the noise, if you want) and users can submit works of art to the gallery. With younger students, a teacher could take screenshots of the work and then print them out or add them to an online class website.

This Is Sand

This Is Sand Gallery

Related stuff

Paint your Masterpiece with ArtRage 2

Let’s Have Some Phun: Physics Gets Creative for Young Learners

Build your own Fantastic Contraption

Take your physics hypotheses to the next level with OE-CAKE’s Physics Simulator

BY BILL FERRIS

Human history has long been documented in cartoon form. From the earliest cave paintings to today’s heavy-handed editorial cartoons, ink and paper (or cave walls) have recorded many of the watershed events in human history. Illustrator Jon White carries on this fine tradition at Today’s Document by making cartoons inspired by our country’s various historical happenings. White himself sums it up best:

“Our National Archives, here in Washington, DC, publishes a handy, educational RSS feed called “Today’s Document.” From those Documents, you’ll see me make drawings here. Some of them have cows.“

(more…)

BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Okay, when I first saw this website (and got a look at its name), I was thinking to myself, “wait…what?” But after taking the time to explore The Country Dog Gentlemen Travel to Extraordinary Worlds, I saw it offers a nice exploration of art history through the use of technology.

In a nutshell, the site looks at famous works of art and the artists who created them through the lens of two really surreal-looking dogs. After you explore the artwork, there is an interactive area where you can create your own artworks based on the famous piece you just explored. It’s easy to navigate and would be appropriate for younger students to self explore.

(more…)

BY KEVIN HODGSON

This article is also posted on LEARN NC.

“Are we Glogging today?”

It’s a typical New England morning and our sixth grade students are all dutifully lined up in the fading autumn sunshine beneath the trees. Most schools typically have a series of fire drills toward the start of the year, and my school is no exception. I keep an eye on my class and chat quietly with my colleague who teaches science down the hall. She is eyeing the truck of the fire chief warily.

“I hope he doesn’t come through my room,” she whispers. I imagine a Bunsen burner left on or something. The fire officials come through random classrooms during fire drills, making sure that there are clear escape routes.

“Why?”

“The posters,” she says, “for the Scientific Method Fair. My room is covered with posters. Posters everywhere.”

Luckily, the fire chief doesn’t come into our wing of the school. On the way back in, I glance into my colleague’s room. Sure enough, there are three-paneled cardboard posters everywhere as our 80 sixth-graders prepare for the upcoming science fair for our school and families. I wouldn’t want to see the look on the fire chief’s face if he came in there, but what could she do? Posters of student work have been part of classrooms for a long time and few things have the potential to make learning so visible as a well-constructed poster of information.

What could she do? Well, she could move the entire project online, as I did a few weeks later, when each day, I was greeted at the door by students asking, “Are we Glogging today?”

(more…)

BY GRETCHEN SCHAEFER

When it comes to students building models in class, why should they make the same old sugar cube igloo as everyone else when they can create paper replicas of the Capitol building? Creating a 3D model on the computer can be fun for aspiring architects and designers, but the fun doesn’t have to stop at the screen. Waybe is a program to bring your digital models to life using plain paper, tape, scissors, and Google.

(more…)

BY KEVIN HODGSON

Stopmotion Animator is a freeware download that allows users of PC computers to use a webcam to easily and quickly create stop-motion movies. The software is set up to “grab” frames off the webcam, then gather them together into a single .AVI video file. Stopmotion Animator allows you to tweak some settings as well. For example, you can set the number of frames you want shot with each mouse click (a single frame per shot will make the video more fluid in motion but will take a lot longer to make, so I suggest that the setting be placed at three to five frames per shot).

BY BILL FERRIS

Aviary, the web-based image-editing suite, used to charge for some premium features like saving private files and allowing access to tutorials. I say “used to” because they’ve stopped charging money for it.

This is a great development for art and design teachers looking for a viable alternative to Adobe Creative Suite. Aviary gives schools the ability to start graphic- and web-design classes without spending a fortune on the software.

(more…)

BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Looking to harness your student’s creative energy and possible have them win a college scholarship at the same time? Google is once again staging their Doodle 4 Google competition, letting K-12 students across the country take a crack at redesigning the iconic Google logo. We’ve plugged this competition in the past, but it’s worthy of a re-mention. The theme for this year’s competition is “If I Could Do Anything, I Would …” All of the details about how to register your school and submit entries can be found here.

(more…)

BY BILL FERRIS

It’s that time of year again when lazy bloggers rehash old material under the guise of “Best of” lists rather than come up with new stuff. Instructify is no exception.

Below are the top 10 Instructify posts of 2009. The rankings were determined via a combination of Google Analytics, retweets, and the capricious and arbitrary whims of the editor.

(more…)

BY BILL FERRIS

Today we’ve got two resources dealing with comics for you:

Before political cartoons devolved into crude drawings depicting a guy wearing a T-shirt labeled “TAXES” and smashing something with a hammer, they were elaborately drawn works of art, and often featured more text than some of today’s news stories. The Hale Scrapbook from The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library maintains an extensive collection of editorial cartoons from Gregorian England. Your students will be able to see the issues of the era as seen through the lenses of the doodlers of the day. Some seem kinda weird. Others show that times really haven’t changed that much.

(more…)

BY BILL FERRIS

You can use portfolios for everything from exhibiting student projects to creating a teaching portfolio. Back in my day, though, building a portfolio meant shelling out a few bucks for a three-ring binder and those plastic pageholders — and then I had to spend way more time than I budgeted for stuffing and organizing my work in the binder. Carbonmade takes the hassle out of the portfolio process by letting you or your students set up free, simple portfolios online.

(more…)

BY BILL FERRIS

Just because you don’t know web design doesn’t mean you can’t have a nice-looking website. Wix lets you create a Flash-based website from one of their many templates, or build a site from scratch. Here’s a sample site I made in about five minutes. Wix templates allow you to create sub-pages, upload photos, and incorporate animations into your design.

(more…)

BY BILL FERRIS

As the perpetrator of some of the worst handwriting in a fifty mile radius, I’ve grown to love choosing the right font. The right typeface can produce the sort of artful lettering my hands can’t. Or so I thought. FontStruct lets me use my hands (by way of my mouse) to create my own fonts that I can download and use. Oh, okay, so it’s not exactly handwriting, but it’s the most legible thing my hands have ever produced.

FontStruct works via a grid method. Simply fill in the grid with blocks of various shapes to form each letter. Some of the existing fonts on the site allow you to clone them, so you can get a better look at how the magic happens. There are a lot of shapes to try out on the grid, and creating an entire alphabet will take some time, but isn’t it worth it to have your own custom-built typeface?

(more…)