Teachers Love SMART Boards

SMARTBoards and Sharing Is Caring - Art

I hope that this week's Sharing Is Caring examples have inspired you to begin sharing some of your knowledge and resources with other teachers who are working so hard to make a difference in the lives of others.

This isn't just about helping teachers - it's also about setting an example for your students. Students want to create and share what they do with others. This is a natural tendancy of the human spirit. Instead of stifeling this natural trait, let's embrace it!

Today's example of Sharing Is Caring is an blog called ArTechTivity by Ms. Cynthia Gaub.  Ms. Gaub teaches Art and Technology at North Middle School in the Everett School District. Ms. Gaub is also the 2009 Middle School Art Teacher of the Year as nominated by the Washington State Art Educators Association.

This blog is a great example of what a teacher can do to help her students perform at their highest potential and is one of the best examples of a student-centered resource that I've ever seen.

It contains examples of her students' work, class handouts, class notes, class assignments, PowerPoint examples, videos, interactive links and much, much more.  It didn't take me more than a few minutes to find some amazing resources that could be used in any art education program.

Another way to demonstrate your commitment to Sharing Is Caring is to share this resource with other teachers in your school. You'll be glad you did.

 

SMARTBoards and Creating Original Artwork

Here are five of my favorite websites for creating original artwork. These sites go way beyond just drawing a picture on the computer and they all work great on the SMART Board. Enjoy!

artPad

This is one of my favorite sites for creating original artwork. In addition, you can do various things with your artwork like playback the drawing, include the drawing in a art.com gallery of other paintings, and view and modify other drawings in the art.com gallery. The interface is fantastic and it works great on the SMART Board. 

Bomomo

This is a very unique painting site that uses abstract paint brushes to create extremely imaginative and beautiful artwork. One of the things I like best about this site is the ability to save your artwork directly to a "jpg" file.

Mr. Picassohead

Believe it or not, the name of this says it all. You create your own Mr. Picassohead using various "picasso-like" features for face, hair, eyes, nose, etc. It's really quite engaging and definitely a lot of fun.

Repper

I'm really addicted to this site that allows you to use your own images to create patterns. This site is very easy to use and the patterns you create can be used as backgrounds. The site has a short video that shows you how easy it is to use Repper and take the pattern that you create and share them or use them in various ways.

 

Thisissand

This is sand. Yes it is. To use this site, you touch on the SMART Board and sand will begin pouring from where you are touching. You can change colors of the sand and you can drop the sand from anywhere on the screen. Click on the small box in the upper-left corner of the screen for instructions. One of the neatest things to do on this site is look at the gallery of images other people have created. Some of them are simply amazing.

Sharing is Caring!

SMARTBoards and Sketch & Paint Online

 
It's definitely an exciting time to be exploring the Internet and experimenting with all the wonderful Web 2.0 applications. These applications do not require you to download any software and they work just like a program installed on your computer's hard drive.

I actually do not like to recommend sites that require you to install any software onto your computer unless an online application does not exist yet. Users, especially Windows users, take some risk when downloading and installing software applications from unknown sources over the Internet.

One group of Web 2.0 applications that are a lot of fun to use are paint applications. These applications allow you to draw, sketch, and paint using various paint tools. Most of these work great on the SMART Board interactive whiteboard but not all of them allow you to save your work to your computer's hard drive. 

The program I've been using lately is Sketch & Paint written by Tom Eriksson and available from his site called OneMotion.com. (Tom has a lot of other really cool stuff on his site so definitely check it out!)

Tom has managed to create a very intuitive method of selecting colors, tools, and tool options that make it very easy for students (and teachers) to use the application. Best of all, you can save your work to your hard drive as a JPG image and you can even open JPG images from your computer and edit them using his application.

Teachers, why not spice up some of your Notebook lessons by creating some simple backgrounds and/or sketches using an application like Sketch & Paint.

My very first creation was a video frame template that is used in Notebook to surround videos. You're more than welcome to download this image here but I highly recommend that you have some fun and create your own!

I want to send a special thank you to Danny Nicholson for sharing this application on his site The Whiteboard Blog! Keep up the great work Danny!

Sharing is Caring!

SMARTBoards and Painting Your Way to Success

I was playing around with the ArtPad from art.com and I find it a totally engaging experience. I love watching the playback of how someone else draws or paints. This site does a really good job allowing you to control playback of your own design or a design already contained in the gallery. The site is so simple to use and it works great on the Smart Board.

This site has obvious uses in an art class but can also add a lot of engagement to an otherwise stagnant lesson.

For example, teachers or students could solve math problems and then decorate the solution for a little artistic touch.

Teachers could have a review lesson called "Painting Your Way to Success" where students get to come to the SMART Board and solve a Math problem. If they solve the problem correctly, they get to spend time decorating it and signing it as long as they don't cover the answer. Teachers could then post the links to the finished art work for students and parents to review. How excited do you think students would be if their Math art work was featured on the Internet and shared by the teacher?!! If you click on the picture above, you can see it being created in artPad. You may want to adjust the speed of the playback.

Please share your ideas for using this site in the classroom!

Sharing is Caring!

SMARTBoards and Getting a Little Funky

Ummm, should I even mention that I found a website that works great with the SMARTBoard but qualifies more as a fun site than an education site? Of course I will. It may just be that perfect site for your school's computer-based art class.

If you're looking for some "funky ways to express yourself" (or someone else) you definitely need to check out "BeFunky." This is a free site that let's you make cartoon images of yourself using your own pictures. You can then add cool effects to your image to keep you laughing for hours. They even have a section that lets you create a cartoon avatar of yourself.

Here's the funky way I changed around my 2-year old son Wesley. 

I could have done so much more to the little guy. Fortunately, he was in a good mood this morning so I decided not to give him devil horns or a funky goatee. All I did was use the sketch and color features and then I put a fun frame around it.

Have fun with this one! You deserve it!

Sharing is Caring!

SMART Boards and Interactive Art Websites

 This collection of interactive art sites for elementary and secondary classrooms is simply outstanding. (How can you not enjoy creating your own Picasso drawing using Mr. Picassohead!?)

Almost all of these applications are SMART Board friendly and should provide hours of fun. I'm so glad it has a link to National Gallery of Art's site called the Art Zone (click here to read my blog post titled SMART Board on the Art Zone). This one still gets my vote of for the all-time best interactive art site.

These sites tend to work a little better on Firefox since you can zoom the application by going to the View menu and selecting Zoom. This should help fill up the SMART Board screen.

Sharing is Caring!

SMARTBoard and The Art Zone

Are you an art teacher looking for a fun resource for your SMART Board interactive whiteboard? Even if you're not, this amazing website is sure to impress you. The site is from the National Gallery of Art and is called NGA Kids The Art Zone. My 7 year old is home from school today and she is memorized by this site. Currently she's playing around with the interactive Jungle activity making her own jungle scene. I can tell I'll have to replace my color print cartridge before the day is done.

This site has more resources than can be mentioned here and you'll love exploring the site to find your favorite resource. My favorite activity on this site is "Flow." It's way cool.

PLEASE pass this on to your fellow teachers. This is one of the absolute best resources I've ever seen for the SMART Board.

Sharing is Caring!