The Teaching Palette

“I’m through. What do I do?”

Posted on 05. Nov, 2010 by Hillary Andrlik + Theresa McGee in All Posts, Art Games, Books, Clean-up and Transition, Clssrm Mgmt, Cool+Creative, Music+Art, Neat Video, Off-task Behavior, Organization and Preparation, Reviews, Tech Stuff, Techniques, Tools and Miscellaneous

It’s those 5, 10, or 15 minutes when students finish assigned work early that can send a teacher into an internal panic.  Instead of panic, be prepared.  We have pulled some of our ready-to-use ideas together to help you fill those last few minutes with meaningful content.

Independent Activities for Early Finishers:

Art Room Showcase 2010: Space Organizing

Posted on 27. Sep, 2010 by Hillary Andrlik + Theresa McGee in All Posts, Clssrm Mgmt, Organization and Preparation

Last year we asked our readers to send us pictures of their art rooms. The response was tremendous and our Flickr gallery really shined with your submissions! This year, we added a new twist! You gave us a closer look into what makes your art room work with bins, posters, drawers, and binders.

There were so many great ideas and unbelievably clever storage solutions that we had a hard time picking only three photos. Congratulations to our three winners Tara Conover, Jessica Houston and Amy Kratochvil for their creative organizational solutions! You can view their photos on The Teaching Palette’s homepage.

Thank you to the following art educators who shared images of their 2010 art space organizational tips:

• Tricia Fuglestad
• Carleen Michener
• Katie Jarvis
• Jodi Youngman
• Dawn Lagerstedt
• Elizabeth Burns
• Hannah Salia
• Dusti Moran
• Melissa Giglio
• Cynthia Borne
• Tisha Burke
• Tara Conover
• Denise Pannell
• Sarah Brooks
• Amy Kratochvil
• Jeannette Anthos
• Jennifer Leban
• Kristen Peck
• Kim Colasante
• Clare Butler
• Theresa McGee
• Hillary Andrlik
• Jessica Houston
• LeAnne Poindexter
• Samantha Melvin

If you would like to add your organization images to our Flickr set, we would be happy to add them! Send your photo, name, school, and brief photo description to info@teachingpalette.com.

Arts in Education Week: Program Communication

Posted on 12. Sep, 2010 by Hillary Andrlik + Theresa McGee in All Posts, Educators in Art

We wanted to celebrate National Arts in Education Week by offering ways to improve art program communication among colleagues, students, and the school community. In any classroom, communication is always an important ingredient for achieving success. But when we stop to think about the many people that we come into contact with each school year, what are we really communicating about our art program?

Ways Art Programs Can Communicate :

Colleagues, Fellow Teachers

• Work as a team. When you have a student acting up in class, talk to his other teachers. Find out if his behavior is happening other places or perhaps there are family issues or peer conflict. It is amazing how much you can learn about a student in 20 seconds. Work together to develop a strategy together to empower everyone.
• Seek teacher input when connecting to the classroom curriculum. Often it will help you create a deeper level of learning in your own cross curricular lessons.
• Don’t expect other teachers to read your mind. If you have a procedure or system that involves other teachers then keep the lines of communication open. Create an art room newsletter for your colleagues.

Parents

• Artsonia is a fantastic communication tool. Create project descriptions as a way to communicate your learning objectives to all artwork visitors. Let the parents, friends, and relatives hear about the art concepts that they have discovered. Share the creative process and celebrate success. This fall, Artsonia will be adding a teacher newsletter feature. You can even customize specific grade-level parents to receive the e-newsletter. If you’re new to Artsonia, see these tips and tutorial on getting started.
• Start a blog, Facebook Fan page, website or Twitter feed. Many upper level teachers use these tools with their students, but they are also useful for parent communication. Here is how a Facebook page is used to communicate with parents. Need help getting started then check out this post on How to Create a Facebook Group for Your Classes.

Students

• Take a moment to acknowledge individual student work and accomplishments. Mail a postcard or send a note home with an individualized message letting a student know what a great job they did or that you noticed how hard they‘ve been working.
• Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic. We have all types of learners in our classroom – teach your concepts or classroom procedures in a way everyone can understand. Write your procedures in multiple places in the room, say the directions out loud and then have the students retell the direction to someone else in the room, and get up and move.

Community

• People wont know what is going on in your classroom unless you tell them. So you say you don’t like to toot your own horn? Get over it . . . now. Your program is too important to be humble. Take pictures of interesting activities and send them in to the local newspaper with a description. If your picture is good, they will use it.
• Create public art for your community and with your students. Art teacher Ian Sands from Apex, North Carolina works with his high school students to create fantastic community art exhibits.

Know Your Administrators

• The fist line of administration we need to work with is our building principals. They hold the keys to scheduling, building budgets, space allocation, teacher evaluations and more. Your principal can be your biggest advocate in many situations. Help your principal out by contributing to your building community.
• Sign up for committee work. There is often committees that focus on whole building or issues such as safety, staff development or technology. Be active in new building initiatives that reach beyond the art room like Peaceful Playgrounds. Volunteer for some of the miscellaneous projects that pop up from time to time such as signs, posters or creating that paw print stencil to mark where kids should stop at the crosswalk. Helping others will build good karma that comes right back to you.
• Get to know the upper administrative team in your district. Introduce yourself at the end of an Institute day. Join a committee that works at the district level. Invite them to art events at your school. They love to see what the kids are doing and escape the office. It also gives them a chance to see your program in action.

In a time when budgets are tight and every program is under scrutiny how we communicate is more important then ever. Be an advocate for your art program.

This post is a part of Craig Roland’s Synchronized Blogging Event celebrating Arts in Education Week! [Synchronized blogging is "where a group of bloggers agree to post on their own blogs on the same broad topic on the same day" (Wikipedia)]

Read more from our other fantastic synchronized bloggers about how to celebrate National Arts in Education Week:

The Art Teacher’s Guide to the Internet

Wonder Brooks Extraordinaire

Mrs. Gillespie’s Blog

The Carrot Revolution

Show Us Your Art Room 2010: Space Organizing

Posted on 25. Aug, 2010 by Hillary Andrlik + Theresa McGee in All Posts, Cool+Creative, Organization and Preparation

It’s another school year and we know most of our readers have been busy preparing their art classrooms to inspire and organize their students. Did you create a genius new system for storing sketchbooks? Or is your storage room an original work of art that maximizes every inch of space available? Then we want to see it.

Wouldn’t it be amazing to see the organizational solutions used by other art educators for supplies, artwork and more? Well this is your chance to share your art space solutions… and see others.

By September 25, send a photo of your art classroom organization to info@theteachingpalette.com. We’ll compile all the art classroom photos into one showcase post and in our Flickr photo stream. Take a look at last years “Art Room Showcase 2009″.  We’ll also feature three lucky photos on our home page as the new “cover art” for The Teaching Palette.

It doesn’t matter what level you teach, we want to see how you organize your space. No art classroom space is too small or too large to share. In the end, we hope to provide an abundance of solutions in an online gallery to help art teachers around the globe get inspired to organize their own spaces. Start opening those drawers, cabinets and storage closets and snap some photos!

How to send your organizational tip:
Snap a photo and send it as an attachment to info@theteachingpalette.com with the subject line Art Room Organization. Include your name, school, town, state and brief description of the photo.

UPDATE 9/27/10: Check out the fantastic submissions by our Teaching Palette Readers!

Teaching Palette Among Top 20

Posted on 25. May, 2010 by Hillary Andrlik + Theresa McGee in All Posts, In The News

We were thrilled today when The Teaching Palette was listed among the Top 20 Blogs from Degrees Online.  It is quite an honor to be mentioned among some of our personal favorite blogs including: Making Teachers Nerdy and Creating Life-Long Learners.

Thank you to all our loyal readers and guest authors as we continue to advocate for quality art education.

Introducing The Teaching Palette Podcast

Posted on 21. May, 2010 by Hillary Andrlik + Theresa McGee in All Posts, Multimedia, Tech Stuff, Technology and Gadgets

All of our video tutorials have been gathered together to create The Teaching Palette Podcast Channel! Now you can subscribe to our educational videos through iTunes and automatically be updated on the latest Palette Podcasts.  Keep up-to-date on the latest art-related videos while on the go and share what you’ve learned with other art educators. Subscribe though iTunes or watch them on the web.

App Review: Hanoch Piven’s Faces iMake

Posted on 04. Apr, 2010 by Hillary Andrlik + Theresa McGee in All Posts, Cool+Creative, Multimedia, Technology and Gadgets

In an earlier post, we interviewed Hanoch Piven, illustrator and children’s book author, about his brand new iPhone app, Faces iMake. The Teaching Palette has been testing Faces iMake for several days and below is our review.

Faces iMake is a collage portrait creator with a clean, user-friendly interface, which makes it great for primary students to navigate.

The catchy music (you can turn off the music in the settings) accompanying the app encourages a happy mood while choosing colors, head shapes and objects for your portrait. A wide range of objects, grouped into different categories — such as food, tools, toys, kitchen, school, buttons, letters — provide the app-using artist a plentiful palette. You can even favorite your favorite objects for quick selection the next time around.

One feature we found helpful was that you can save finished portraits to a storage gallery where they can be assigned to a contact, saved to your iPhone photo album, emailed to a friend, or shared via Facebook. Or you can re-select your saved portrait and continue working on it.

As part of the interface, users can rotate objects after placing them on their portrait and easily layer objects above or below one another.

The only feature that seems like it is missing is the ability to scale objects, but as Piven explains, “It would have been very easy to scale objects up and down, but I wanted to have limitations that are real life limitations.”

The app’s included video art “lessons” are a great way to get started, and they’re presented in a style much like Piven’s own hands-on workshops.

Overall, the Teaching Palette gives Hanoch Piven’s Faces iMake app two thumbs up.  It provides an excellent way to explain assemblage and portraiture as an art form. And it’s a lot of fun to play with.

One disclaimer, Faces iMake unexpectedly quit on two of our iPhones during testing. A simple restart of the iPhones solved the problem. From what we understand, an update is coming soon to prevent this minor glitch altogether.

Watch the demo below to see how this app works.

While many of us still have limited iPod Touch and iPhone access, here are some classroom/student integration suggestions:

1. Use your personal iPod Touch or iPhone and project images under a document camera for the entire class to see. You should definitely check out IEAR (I Education Apps Review) for additional ideas and tips for using Apps in the classroom.
2. Create a list of great iPhone apps for your students to try at home. An earlier post offers some great art app suggestions.
3. Talk to your school administrator, perhaps s/he would be willing to pilot an iPod Touch or (if you’re very lucky) a classroom set. Or try writing a grant.  You never know unless you try!  For a list of grant opportunities, click here.

Conversation With Hanoch Piven About His New iPhone App “Faces iMake”

Posted on 02. Apr, 2010 by Hillary Andrlik + Theresa McGee in All Posts, Cool+Creative, Tech Stuff

Hanoch Piven, author and illustrator of My Dog is as Smelly as Dirty Socks and What Presidents Are Made Of, is releasing an app for the iPhone / iPod Touch!

Piven’s books are a favorite in our art rooms and among all grade levels. Our students are drawn to his illustrations. In fact, just last week, our school’s Media Resource Center had a waiting list for some of Piven’s titles.

With great anticipation for his transition to mobile publishing, the Teaching Palette recently interviewed Piven about his app, titled Faces iMake, and quizzed him about turning his unique illustration style into an app.

Teaching Palette: What motivated you to create an app in your artistic style?

Hanoch Piven: I’ve been doing my work for twenty years and for ten years have been doing workshops. The workshop has grown and grown. It started with me just going to kindergartens and schools when my books first came out. Then slowly more, and more people participated. The age of the participants went up slowly from primary school kids, to teenagers, to high school kids, to really even working with adults. And also the types of population that started to participate in my workshop really changed and expanded. People going through some trauma, sick people, people in hospitals to managers and CEO’s of companies.

So the workshops became something very important in my life, and I realized that there is something in what I teach that is so accessible. That really anybody can connect to it no mater what the age. They can connect to it because it’s really about play. It’s about really finding what it is to be drawing. Drawing… the way I see it, doesn’t have to be made with a pencil, or with a brush, or with a traditional drawing tool. But it can be made by moving objects around a plain; around an area.

Once the iPhone came out my partner (Eyal Dessau) called me and said he had, ‘such and such idea’. It’s very accessible, very easy to do from the iPhone, very intuitive. But I didn’t want it to be just a game. I just wanted it to, sort of, be a workshop with me… a digital one. So it is very important that is not Photoshop. You relate to the objects the way you would relate to them in the real world. I mean, obviously, it is digital and not exactly this way, but you cannot change the size of objects. You cannot squeeze them. You can turn it, but that’s all about what you can do. So the relationships of size between the objects are true to the real world. Basically putting limitations. It would have been very easy to scale objects up and down, but we wanted …I wanted to have limitations that are real life limitations. And for me limitations have always been a great driving force. And a great set of parameters within which to work.

Teaching Palette: Yeah, I can see that if something doesn’t work, you have to think differently about the objects to use it.

Hanoch Piven: Exactly! And without going much further, the reason I started working with objects is because I had limitations. My drawing skills are not that good. It’s not a joke. It’s really the truth. I don’t draw very well. I draw OK. I draw OK for an amateur like if I compare myself to people who can draw, but within the professionals; compared to the professionals I’m not very good. I realized this when I was in art school and, for me, those limitations — that big limitation — was what sent me looking for my own way of doing things. Which end up being for me, obviously, working with objects. Interestingly enough this whole language that was really developed around my strengths and my weaknesses. Was supposed to be a very personal way; a personal language. So this very personal language ended up being a language that is so easily accessible by everyone. Part of the success of my workshops, and of the idea that other people look at my work and they want to make their own pieces, is that some how people can relate to the idea of, ‘Ok, I don’t know how to draw I usually don’t do art, but here is a way that I can do art.’

Teaching Palette: Yeah, I totally see it, and I love the way you add meaning to the objects in your books. They’re not just there because they fill the right shape.

Hanoch Piven: Right, so this is the second part of it because first I really talk about let’s play. Lets play and let’s play by looking at the world around us in a different way. In my talks, in my workshops, I talk a lot about forgetting what this object really is and just experiencing its shape. So that’s the first stage, just playing with the objects.

The second stage, which you really need also to think about the meaning of the objects, is that really drawing with objects is not only very easy, but it’s very communicative. So it’s the possibility and an opportunity to tell a story without words. So you can really tell something by the types of objects you choose to use.

Teaching Palette: I think that’s why kids gravitate to your art so quickly because it speaks their language. They see it, they understand it and it doesn’t matter what reading level they are.

Hanoch Piven: Those are sort of the principles of my workshop. And how does the application serve as a workshop, because there are some lessons in it. We recorded some videos of me working. I show certain examples of how I work and how all the things that happen to me when I work can be experienced also when you are working. Whether it is in real life or in the iPhone. The movies, the little video clips, are of me working with real objects, not of me working with the app. So it’s kind of like you come to my studio and you see a little bit of how I work.

Teaching Palette: Through your experiences with the workshops, do you have any thoughts on how your app is going to be used in education?

Hanoch Piven: That’s a good question. I think creative teachers can do a lot with it. For me, my experience has been that I can send some energy to the world by my work. And lots of the great things that have happened to me have been because someone has brought me back energy with an idea. So I think and I hope lots of interesting projects come from somebody else will think of them and they will come back to me. So that’s kind of the exciting thing that has happened for me.

I started doing therapeutic art workshops because an art therapist thought of it. And I started doing corporate workshops because some kind of corporate advisor thought of that. So it’s kind of interesting that this kind of energy goes out and comes back.

So I can think of putting out this tool and then I’m sure teachers would have all these great ideas. Obviously, I can think of ideas, which I’m sure you thought of them yourself, like the whole class doing a portrait of George Washington, now let’s do a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, now let’s do an angry face, let’s do a sugary face, let’s do a sad face and then write a poem to describe it.

Teaching Palette: Well, you’re already thinking like a teacher.

Hanoch Piven: Not because I’m so smart, but because I’ve been hearing those things. You know being around teachers I’ve heard of how teachers use the Smelly Dog book to teach similes.

Teaching Palette: Is there a spot on your app where you can write something that goes with the picture they made?

Hanoch Piven: There are letters you can use as objects. They’re pretty large so it’s more like you can write a name, but it’s nice because you can make a picture and write a slogan that goes with that picture, that compliments that picture, that explains something about that picture, that has a dialog with that picture. You can write, I would say, up to 10-15 letters. They are like magnets letters.

Teaching Palette: Very cool!

Hanoch Piven: They could be used if someone is smart enough, creative enough, they can use the letters as shapes and draw with letters.

Teaching Palette: When you finish an image in your app, can you export it to the photo library?

Hanoch Piven: Yes, you can export it to the photo library. You can share it. We have included 100 objects at this point, but we have photographed many more and it can grow and grow and grow and grow. So it’s really limitless. In my workshops I like to say we have on the table all the objects in the world.

Thank you, Hanoch, for taking the time to speak with the Teaching Palette about your iPhone app, Faces iMake, which is currently in the iTunes Store.

We have a copy of the app and were testing it. Look for a review soon.

10 Best Image Sources For Creative Projects

Posted on 02. Jan, 2010 by Hillary Andrlik + Theresa McGee in All Posts, Tech Stuff

Original CC licensed Image by Dylan on Flickr

Educating students (and lets face it, ourselves) about copyright and digital citizenship has become increasingly more important as more and more teaching resources are found online.  While creating original image content may still be the best way to gather images, it is not always practical or even geographically realistic. Copyright-free and public domain images often make the creative process easer by allowing for manipulation without needing to cite the source.  However, there are times when when you can’t find what you need in the public domain or want to teach a lesson on digital citizenship.  In these situations, searching for images with a Creative Commons license can be useful.  Our top ten list of imagery for creative use ranges from “no known copyright” (among the least restrictive) to Creative Commons (creative permissions vary).

1. The Commons This Flickr database contains collections from museums and libraries from around the world.  The images placed in these collections have “no known copyright” and therefore are free to use without attribution.

2. Public Domain Sherpa This is a one stop shop with a great collection of image sources mostly in the public domain. This site also does a great job explaining copyright information in layman’s terms.

3. Morgue File “Public image archive for creatives by creatives”  This fabulous site is full of easily searchable images that require no attribution.

4. Pics4Learning These copyright-friendly images have been donated by teachers, students, and amateur photographers.  Explore the other features and tutorials to help get you started.

5. PD Photo Most of the thousands of images on this site are in public domain, but not all.  Before using any image, read the license under each picture.

6. Creative Commons and Wikimedia Commons These databases are great places to access all sorts of media that you can incorporate into creative projects.  Since both public domain and creative commons images can turn up in a search, be sure to check to see if the image requires attribution.

7. Photos8 This site offers thousands of images free to use for any purpose. The site author doesn’t require attribution but would love to see the creative outcomes.

8. Creativity 103 This source contains images and video ranging from abstract design to architecture.  You are free to download and use any of the images as long as you credit the website.

9. Compflight and FlickrCC These two great tools can help you quickly find images licensed under Creative Commons on Flickr.  Another Flickr option is the advanced search to find images to modify or build upon. Download directions for use with your students here.

10. Google Advanced Image Search This search engine is useful for helping you find specific images such as line drawing or photo content with “safe search” filtering.  To find Creative Commons images, select the search terms usage rights “labeled for reuse” or “reuse with modification”.

Oh, and a couple of things that you will want to explore . . .

Creative Project Image Search We gathered many resources listed here along with a few others to create a custom search engine for public domain, copyright-friendly, and Creative Commons images.  This tool could be something you add to student bookmarks to make image searching easy.

If you still can’t find what you need, Copyright Friendly Wiki and Teacher Librarian Wiki are both excellent resources to find images to use.

Teaching Palette on Facebook!

Posted on 13. Dec, 2009 by Hillary Andrlik + Theresa McGee in All Posts, Tech Stuff

The Teaching Palette is now on Facebook!  With 350 million Facebook users we thought it would be a great place to connect.  We’ll update you on new posts, occasionally pull favorites from our archives, and share insights from around the world.  Become a fan and use the space as a place to leave comments or suggest ideas for us to write about.  We love art education and sharing with all of you!