Ugly Sweater Skating Party!

Phoenix winters do not include snow, so I try to give kids a little taste of building a snowman, ice skating, and ugly sweaters. Sure, the building task is the main skill, but we do it in a fun way. Most of the kids were able to line up the spheres easily, but the face is actually quite difficult to assemble. (See Animoto below)

DoubleView Silhouette Portraits

Jr. High students created a double view portrait by first taking a front view and a side view of each other. They cleared out the backgrounds, resized the images, and tried to line up the features on the side view with the front view. They selected a specific portion of the side view and deleted the silhouette from the front view creating the bizarre look of the portrait. After that they added a layer with either a gradient or photo as a background for their portrait. Many digital tools and skills were used to create these pieces. (See Animoto below)

Adding Warhol Projects to Mini Galleries

Apologies for the audio. My students get very enthusiastic as they are working on the grid. As they complete their Warhol projects in Gimp, they will upload them to the Jokaydia Grid and place them in their galleries.
They are still struggling with the design principle of unity and some of the galleries look more like mini garage sales, but in time they will become more unified in style.
At the Jr. High age, you need to give students some flexibility in working so they can play around with textures and shapes. An aesthetic sensibility is years in the making and these students are really just beginning to form their own artistic choices.

Newbies 2012!

A new batch of avatars is the first class to be using the Jokaydia Grid. Their first ojective on the grid was to create a prim with the Bling texture they created using Gimp and placing it in the outer corner of their room as a name plate. They are wearing t-shirts created from a Gimp template to which they applied a layer with their name design. They will also upload their WORDLE and create furniture for their mini gallery/lounge area. This video was recorded using SMART Recorder.

Gearing up for a Great School Year!

School starts soon and I can't wait for my students to explore the Jokaydia Grid!

Artistopoly on the RG

Kindergarten through 2nd Grade got a chance to use the student avatars decked out in artwork t-shirts and play recognition games using the Artistopoly gameboard I modified from Monopoly. They had an excellent time running to find "The Scream" or "The Mona Lisa." (See Animoto below)

Ugly Sweater Party on the Reaction Grid!

For our last class of the semester all avatars got a set of 4 ugly holiday sweaters, a Santa hat, and a pair of skates with a skating animation. Students had to use the snipping tool, save pics to their folder and then put them on their Prezis. Here are the photos that got taken. Our sim crashed mid-party, but Reaction Grid gurus Chris Hart and Kyle Gomboy were ready to help us out. We love working and playing on the Reaction Grid! (See video below)