Header Images, Wordle, Wikipaedia and Image Search: 2

Over the weekend I waxed a little around a project I had begun with my ICT club.  We used Wordle, Wikipaedia and Google image search as tools in the collect and store phase of a web page header or banner project.  This week the students engaged with the prepare and share phase, completing some of the banners they are hoping to see exhibited on the school website and class blogs, as devices that will add to the house style while individualizing each class page in school.

I decided to use MS paint in the end since this is a tool the students were already familiar with, and thought I'd share one or two of the outcomes here.  The students are really pleased with them, and actually for a first attempt by them at something like this I think they are very cool.  Looking at the objects it is interesting how even beginning with the same tools, playfulness and freedom to select final outcomes for display has lead to a deal of creative variation.  I hope you enjoy.

Woodpecker Class Y 4 Student

Dove Class Y4 Student

Hawks Y5 Student

Kestrels Y4 Student

Header Images, Wordle, Wikipaedia and Image Search

Having spent most of this week culling the content of the current Primary Phase website, I began pondering a simple way in which students could be involved in supporting the development of the site theme.  Primary Phase classes are named after birds, and within the learning communities section of our website I want first of all to create a gallery section  for each class that will enable outcomes and processes behind longer projects, ICT tasks and digital works to be displayed, as well as providing spaces that students and colleagues can update themselves.  The intention of the latter is that colleagues and students take greater responsibility and ownership of the content we publish, reducing the expectation that one person maintain the entire space, which has been the historical context.  To this end the galleries for the time being at least will remain as standard web pages, locally developed and then updated by FTP, while each class will be provided with a blog space.  I hope to create an aggregated feed for these allowing updates to be fed to the site's home page.  However the subject of today's post is not this but a simple project I began this week to create class header images.

I began the process with my ICT club on Thursday, as we worked through the collect and store phase of the project.

Step 1 of the project was to collect and store from a Google Image search a number of graphics representing class birds.

Step 2 was to open an instance of Wordle in their web browser and to open a second tab where they accessed Google.  Students were encouraged to choose a class bird from the school list and then to search for information about their chosen bird.

Step 3 and the next phase of the creative process was a copy and paste task, transferring text from the web pages that contained relevant factual information about their bird to the create "text box" in their Wordle tab.

Step 4 involved the create button, and time spent manipulating the resulting word clouds until they liked the outcome they had developed and discussing the appearance.  Why were the words presented in different sizes?  What were the key and most common words?  What did they tell us about our bird?  Within the creation process students could change font and layout, with the only real limitation that the word clouds as a group should have a consistent colour scheme.  ( I have to admit to not being overly successful or persuasive in this matter, so we will have to wait and see how this pans out in the longer term, but such is the creative process and who knows!)

Step 5 Students placed their finished Wordle central to the browser window and rather than saving it, we used the print screen key to copy the browser window and then pasted this to Photofiltre, where we cropped our images and saved them for use later.

Our next step will be the prepare and share phase, involving provision of a blank header frame, and the use of either Photofiltre or Microsoft Paint to combine elements, the class bird we have collected with its Wordle.  Yes I know... Microsoft Paint again... but it is quite interesting what can be achieved with this tool.  Using more than one instance, images can be copied from one and pasted to another containing the template or frame and then resized within their selection boxes and moved around the canvas before deselecting and releasing them to the background.  The above sample in fact was created in just this way. Using Photofiltre the images can be opened and then resized or scaled before copying and pasting for placement in a prepared template of a standard size, for placement in the completed web pages.

To finish the project students will be encouraged to export their finished header images as .jpg files and to upload them to a shared space on the VLE.  From here they can be added to the website's image folder and also added to class pages on the VLE.  Once on the web server and included in class gallery pages they will also have a URL enabling them to be included as header images in class blogs.  Though I am still in two minds about which tool I will finally use with the group to compose the final images, I hope that the students will begin to identify with the website through their creative ownership of static page elements such as the headers, and with the inclusion of these objects and ongoing online activity through blogging in the VLE take a proactive role in developing class ownership of the blog spaces to be provided and also including their designs.

Revisiting Viewpoints: Working in the Style of Monet

In a previous post, Viewpoints: Working in the style of Monet I presented a learning story, showing how I and a group of Y4 students had used

• images as discussion points around the work and style of the artist
• drawn on these over a number of weeks to sequentially develop graphics using ICTs based on this work

The unit, involved the use of a common graphics package (MS Paint) to construct and manipulate student self created images while also consolidating functional ICT skills.  These include

• limited tool choices to create image elements in the given style. eg spray can and colour pallette
• Select and copy tools
• Introducing and consolidating the "cascade save" process, using save as and "sensible file" names to build a portfolio of progression through each activity, and return points to which we can go if errors are made, and navigation of network drive spaces.
• Understanding how we can use a graphics package to compose images by drawing together elements we create seperately
  
• Using a collection of predeveloped (drafted image) elements and toggling between software instances, through the use of select copy and paste tools to arrange image compositions.
• Explore cause and effect using rotation and flip tools (in Paint) or by extension to use more complex graphic tools, to investigate and explore filters and effects, before choosing images for our final outcome.

Previous units have resulted in students creating "IKEA" style Prints.  Using MS Publisher to import their final image before adding text and printing out their work on the colour laser.  This time around though I am intending to develop an entirely digital outcome by exploring Monet scenes that reflect seasonal change.  Working with KS2 Students the outcome and brief is to use graphics tools and the collect, store, share and prepare process to produce a short animated sequence based on a single viewpoint or landscape that shows how a scene might appear at different times of the year.

How will this be achieved?

Using Microsoft Paint the students will create a landscape, showing skyline, mid and forground and develop a simple tree skeleton motif using the spray can tool to include trunk and branches.  The tree skeleton will be saved as treespring, treesummer and so on.

Drawing on discussions about how trees appear in images representing the seasons, colour choices made by the artist for mood and effect, the students will  develop their own representations of the tree motif during each season considering  colour choices and exploring the effects they can create by layering spray effects. We will maintain a copy of our original tree skeleton motif as a return point, and for later use in the project.

Using the original tree skeleton, students will be encouraged to create a single landscape starting point, by copying and pasting instances of it to the landscape they have created, composing their own particular viewpoint before saving four copies of this, named landscapespring, landscapesummer and so on. 

To each of these landscapes the students will apply the effects  they developed during their exploration of their tree images to show how they think they might appear during each of the seasons.  They might also explore further detailing, eg sky colour effects perhaps through the use of additional painting tools and the undo tool,  while using save as to keep copies.

Digital Outcome

Using Photostory and the images the students have developed I would like them to create a simple morphing sequence of change for their landscape.  They will be encouraged to select 4 of their images 1 representing each season and to import these to Photostory.  These will then be chronologically ordered on the timeline, before applying transition effects and times.  They will be encouraged also to choose one additional image from those created and to add text to this forming a title overlay.  To complete the project they will add a music track before exporting their completed video for addition to either their class or personal blog space within the VLE for review by colleagues and other students.

If readers have any thoughts about how this project outcome might be further developed I would love to hear from you.  In my new role this year I am also working with a number of Key Stage 3 classes and would be interested to hear from colleagues any ideas they may have about how this type of work might be adapted, extended or used as an element within projects for students in this phase of learning.    

Looking Into The Past And Playing with Images

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Looking Into the Past: Market Street, Leesburg, VA on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

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I love this idea From Jason Powell pointed out by a colleague on Twitter. In previous posts I have reflected and waxed about how we might use historical images to investigate, locate, discuss and compare modern scenes within a given location. This use of digital photography to embed the past within the modern scene however is a really interesting idea. I like the way the historical landscape is not removed from the scene, but used as integral to it and fits like a missing piece from a jigsaw puzzle. Just pondering how this type of image composition process might be used as part of a digital photography project. How practical it might be to embed it in field trips or orientering type activity.

Being a bit of a Pink Floyd fan, and ambling off track a little as usual, seeing these images and a recent tweat around using ICT to support art projects reminded me of a small scale project with some students a while back using a trial version of Serif Photoplus I picked up at a conference. The project involved creating images in the style of Magritte.

Downloaded scans of paintings from the Internet were used initialy to create template files and masks, where for example in this image the landscape was removed. The painting and window used to form a framing layer. The students used digital cameras to capture views and images from around school including landscapes and objects captured from unsual angles.

Once downloaded to the computer the children chose a frame for their image, and applied filter effects to their own images, before inserting these to the template, and exporting these as jpegs. This video presentation contains the student outcomes from this activity.

Within the National Primary Framework for Literacy there are number of references to using graphic manipulation to apply effects to images either in response to texts or in support of composition through the creation of scenes and settings. Some of these images particularly the landscapes make for strange viewing.

A number of Magritte's images make great starting points for discussion generally, but would also make brilliant talk for writing prompts in developing openers and links to the weird and wonderful in narrative units such as those associated with Fantasy and Strange World Settings. Here are a couple that set my mind a whirring.

• Time Transfixed
• The Blank Cheque
• The Oasis

An Animated Short: From Wrapping Paper to a Digital Greeting

I know, I know, its only the end of November, but as we all know preparing quality work takes time. For the last 3 weeks I have been working with my students in the school's ICT suite to develop graphics for use in their own personalised and Desk Top Published Christmas cards.

The process took the students through

• Wireframing a draft Christmas Motif
• Editing this to create a final coloured design
• Copying and pasting this motif to create repeating patterns (wrapping paper style)
• And finally experimenting with how different background colours and colour sequences in their designs effected the seasonal appeal of their image.

My favourite file name has got to be "complicated," expressing the students view of his work, as he included 2 colours in his background pattern and developed a similar process in recolouring sequentially the Christmas trees on his paper. Mathematically the task provided opportunities to use flip and rotate tools in MS Paint, enabling exploration of ideas around translation, rotation as well as line symmetry. Linking patterning to these ideas also provided challenges around rule making, and requiring visual prediction skills, and editing to ensure all spaces within the design followed the rules we had decided upon for our patterns.

This week most of the students have chosen their "favourite" wrapping paper design and used design wizards in MS Publisher to create their card, including this design on the front, and some including the smaller design motif elsewhere, personalising the greeting. They are very attractive as outcomes and even the simpest of designs, when repeated have produced some really intricate outcomes.

One of my students, building on our units of work last year, has developed a real interest in using Pivot Stick Animator to tell short visual stories. It's been a bit chilly this week and during lunchtimes he has been working away on this.



Very imaginative and creative yet somehow "Pythonesque" or "game like," he extended his use of the wrapping paper design to form a background and structure for his story including characters, who navigate a maze of santa's sleighs, falling between gaps, or limboing under others, transforming as they move shapes from one sleigh to another. This has inspired some thought about how easily we could extend this project to use images we have already developed to create digital online christmas cards.

To make this movie

• The pivot animation file was saved as a .gif file
• The gif was imported to MS MovieMaker along with a suitable sound track.
• The gif was dragged to the timeline and sound track added
• After some editing in MovieMaker to get the look and feel right, the completed movie was then exported as a video file in .wmv format.

I have posted previously about this and you can read about it by following this link. The completed movie can now be played standalone in a Media Player, or could even be uploaded to somewhere like Google Video for hosting and inclusion in a blog or school website like I have done with J's permission here. So J and I will begin the festivities here early and with no apologies by wishing you all a very Merry Digital Christmas.

Repeating Patterns and DT: A Christmas Card Project For KS2

Even though I often express concern about our over reliance on the QCA scheme of work units, they are still incredibly useful starting points for thinking about activities or sequences of work we might develop with students. Unit 4b developing images and repeating patterns is a nice starting point for developing images, in a range of graphics packages while introducing the sometimes bizarre vocabulary that relates to how these tools work, and one which I used to frame my favourite unit of work for Y4 students.

The about this unit section says in this unit children will

• learn to develop visual ideas
• realise these ideas using ICT.
• use a computer graphics package to explore and experiment with ideas, amending and modifying their work to meet specific outcomes.
• learn to save their work as they go along (I would hope that by Y4 they are consolidating this).
• learn to use ICT tools appropriately and to select areas of an image to cut, copy and change. learn to export their work to other packages and import images from sources such as clip art, scanner or digital camera.

The key statement for me in this whole introduction is that "children will apply what they have learnt in this unit... to produce pictures, plans and maps in art, design and technology, and.. (or).. geography." When I originally designed my unit of work the series of tasks that evolved focused around the Design and make Process for a Christmas card, embedding the ICT skills in moving towards this outcome.

The outcome for the "integrated task" says that children should use

"a variety of materials, created on and away from the computer, and use them to make a final image." This I interpreted to mean, drawing on available designs as well as the use of additional ICT tools and resources. The remainder of this post describes the process in its DT context, through ICT

IDEAS (Investigative, Disassembly and Evaluative Activities)

This unit was designed to fit with and work alongside a mechanisms unit for Design and Technology, where the design brief was to design and make an animated Christmas card. Students were provided with examples of existing cards, to evaluate, discussing and drawing from these common themes and ideas. In ICT sessions we also used the internet to explore Christmas scenes and images. We began also to use tools in Microsoft Paint to develop wire frames, of common Christmas Motifs. We focused on how shape tools could be used to form skeleton structures around which to develop our images, saving individual images, that might later be used as "stamps" in the composition of larger Christmas scenes.

FPTs (Focussed Practical Tasks)

The intention of any DT project is that all children should be able to realise a quality outcome, and in order to achieve this they must be provided with available designs to evaluate , innovate on and or develop. In class the students engaged in a range of making tasks, that involved them in constructing predefined mechanisms, rotary window type designs, the use of cams and lever based mechanisms, pop ups and sliders. As we engaged the students were required to evaluate as a class the outcomes they were creating. Drawing on previous experiences with cards, which parts of the images might we be able to animate, and which of the mechanisms might we use to enable this to happen. In my classroom I see FPTs as early prototyping activities, spaces and activities through which students can begin to visualise the relationships between the skills input, and the final design outcomes they hope to develop. Gill Hope, presents some really interesting ideas about design and technology in the Primary School, and the dangers inherent in requiring young children to draw and record what they want to make before they begin, design as a process is an ongoing sand iterative process, evolving continually as we evaluate and appraise our progress, and solve problems. Prototyping is a key area in the design process, and one which I feel should be as practical as possible. During DT activities, I am never without my digital camera, as I find this is one of the most powerful tools I have available to record and document student activity, and frequently use images captured through the use of Powerpoint to document learning stories. DT it seems for many is a real issue in terms of maintaining evidence, where do we store it? I find my hard drive or flash drive is ideal!?

In ICT sessions the students, were also encouraged to prototype, as we developed our wireframes, using fill tools, brushes, zoom copy and paste to add detail to our motifs. Our outcome in ICT was also to make a Christmas Card, but to use a desk top publisher to eventually achieve our design outcome. The children were taught how to use their motifs to construct a Christmas scene, and to use copy and paste techniques to develop a simple repeating pattern based on example of Christmas Wrapping paper designs we had discussed. This gave opportunities to discuss layering and transparent or opaque selections, and their effects on the images we were producing, to discuss how new layers pasted appeared on top of previous images pasted and the need to pre think and plan sequentially the order in which we would import, or paste our motifs to the image using our chosen tool. Using the transparent select tool we were able to make underlying layers show through, but once the imported section of our image was deselected, the only way back was through the undo tool. This really brought home the reasons why we need to "cascade save" after significant changes have been made. When we had made our wrapping paper designs students were encouraged to experiment with different fill colours, and to think about which made their paper appear most christmassy!!!

The DMA (Design and Make Activity)

In DT sessions the students, made "mock ups," and working models which were separate initially from their cards. They went through processes of trial and error, drawing on the mechanism designs they were familiar with to bring about the effects they were trying to achieve, and when happy that their designs met the success criteria we had established earlier from our design brief, applied their mechanism to a card. These cards then were decorated to match the effect required. Some children used images and objects developed in ICT sessions to apply to their cards.

In ICT, the children now had a range of motifs and design types they had developed that they could use to make their Christmas Card. We used Microsoft Publisher to do this, beginning from a design Wizard, the students used the the step by step process to generate their own Christmas card writing frames. Choosing from the images they had developed they were able to recreate the card the way they wanted it to look, innovating on the presented design to include/import their own images, and to drag them around the page to where they would like to put them. They could also include text in the form of text boxes or through the use of Word Art, and add borders and boxes to break up the pages they were making. Using Publisher in this way the students were also engaging in visual prototyping, discussing the effects they were creating and and making decisions about which images they would like to include and why? Considering text effects, and how these impacted on the overall design and personal aesthetic they wanted to bring to the document. The students were able to use clipart to reform the border art they wanted to apply, or to bring in additional web based or clipart images. When completed the students were asked to publish the card they wanted to keep and take home to the "Published Work folder" on their home drives. We only allow monochrome printing in the ICT Suite, so black and white mock ups were printed by each child to learn the making process, but each child's individual card was also printed out to card on the Colour Laser Printer we have for special work.

Using the tools on the iBoard Christmas site, our year one students last year were also encouraged to make Christmas scenes. See my very first post Photofiltre and screen printing. I used the print screen function to capture and save the images they had developed, pasting these to a graphics package, cropping them to be saved as .jpg files using the student's names to index them. Using MS publisher, I later imported and printed cards individually, that they were able to fill in with their own greetings. They loved the quality of the output, and were really excited that they were able to give something they had made on the computer to a special someone .

Just thinking now how amazing and exciting it might be to develop this further to combine the DT and ICT elements through the use of the plotter cutter we have recently gained...