We had a really hectic but enormously enjoyable day today. I was running a training activity as part of our Apple Regional Training Centre programme, looking at the notion of e-portfolios in art and design.

We started by taking photos around the school, exploring the basic elements of art and design such as line, colour, texture etc. We then looked at how to use iPhoto as an organisational tool. I know it’s designed as a home / family photo tool, but it really does have enormous potential for organising an e-portfolio of work. We also had a play with Picnik, which I think is a really exciting web-based application. There seems less and less reason these days for anyone installing software locally on their computer. There is such a good range of quality tools available as essentially web-broswer based packages. Goobye to Microsoft Office then!

We also did some work with Flickr. There is talk of the South West Grid putting a countywide block on Flickr in schools, which would appalling if true. There is such a huge amount of potential use for teaching and learning. And it’s free. Interestingly, in the two or three years of showing Flickr at workshops for teachers, this was the first time there were no issues about using it. Everyone logged on, uploaded photos and got into commenting and note making with hardly a query. I think we managed to show the teaching and learning possibilities really clearly, which makes the Grid’s rumoured blocking all the more frustrating.

If you are interested, you can see the work that we did here.

We were talking about thinking skills at the Learning Group meeting this afternoon. Unfortunately I had not been at the last meeting and hence had missed out on the decision to trial a variety of different thinking skills tasks within classes. Nevertheless it struck me that the Year 11 task I was blogging about earlier fits into this realm quite well. Having watched the students grapple with the design task over the past few lessons, it has struck me that there is an enormous amount of thinking and problem solving taking place in each individual. It’s enlightening to watch all of their screens via Remote Desktop and to see the multitude of processes unfolding before one’s eyes. It seems that by working within fairly rigidly defined guidelines (i.e. a restricted set of resources, rules and a very clear – but open ended – design brief) they are able to engage their thinking skills much more readily than if they were given more ‘freedom’.

I’m really pleased with the work being produced by my Digital Arts year 11 classes. We’ve been doing some work on text and image cropping, partly inspired by the old Blue Note jazz record sleeves, and partly by the Tomato company’s work on the Underworld ‘mmm skyscraper I love you’ album of , oooh, too many years ago to bear thinking about. The focus on text use was also in direct response to the moderator’s report after last year’s exam marking.

So the students have been making some excellent pieces of work. And it’s successful for the reasons I mentioned in my last post, but also because they have been given a very clear brief, with a limited number of ingredients. When too many different elements come into play it can be very difficult to reach a successful conclusion, design wise.

Flock

Sorry, little bit of a techie post this one, but if you are a Flickr user and have not yet tried the Flock browser, can I urge you to do so? I love it!  It is a terrific tool to use if you regularly post images to Flickr, or browse images from your Flickr contacts or groups. It's also a very good blogging tool and integrates well with del.icio.us. Plus it handles rss feeds better than any browser I've tried and has even made me move from NetNewsWire for my rss aggregation needs. Certainly worth checking out.

Blogged with Flock

I read this today and thought it made a lot of sense...

Really interesting software currently in development is this: xcavator by Cognisign - Better photo sharing and photo cataloging. Having spent several days trying to properly organise my own image library of nearly ten thousand images, any way of being able to intelligently search through the database is welcomed with open arms.

The exercise has also made me realise that there is no longer any significant point having carefully organised folder systems to store your data in – as long as your files have relevant meta-data or tags, it doesn’t matter where it is. Having said that, I’m aware things might be different on Windows PCs where they may not yet have the kind of searching facilities as Mac users have with Spotlight, for example, but still… It’s something that raises interesting points in how we teach students to store and organise their data. The importance of tagging and adding meta-data to files is only going to become more and more crucial, and it’s something we need to be looking at in our approaches in the classroom.

Oh, and I’m using iPhoto to organise my image library. I considered using others like Adobe Bridge which comes built into Creative Suite, or Extensis Portfolio, and whilst those are very powerful applications, I really like the idea that through the iMedia browser I can access any of my iPhoto images from any application. And whilst the keywords facility in iPhoto is undeniably fiddly, it’s better than nowt.

Flickr training

Nice to see people picking up the Flickr baton and running with it :-) Richard and Sadie are running a course titled Flickr in Art and Design - Primary and Secondary at Great Mooor House on 14th September 2006. Full details here. Meanwhile, I'm hoping to get a 'how to' podcast of accessing/using Flickr done over the holidays. It's on my sizeable to-di list....

Podcasts

There was a bit of discussion on a one to one basis yesterday during the Photoshop part of the ICT Art Textiles course about having ‘how to’ instructions written down. I know Tony has provided some of that information on the resources CD that was available to the workshop attendees, but I’ve been thinking for a while about how much more useful videos of work in practice would be. I played with this a bit in the winter last year, making short screen grab videos of some practical Photoshop activities. They are very much ‘how to’ videos and don’t concern themselves much with Art ideas and so-on, but those kinds of videos might follow hopefully.

My plan is for a wide range of these videos to be available to students as learning resources. The idea is that it frees me up in lesson time to talk to students about the Art element of their work. If they need to remind themselves about how to practically do something, they can plug in their headphones and watch the video. I’ve made them available as Podcasts too, so theoretically people can download them onto their video iPod or other mobile devices too. I’m excited by the potential offered by this.

Oh, yeah, the address for the Podcast is:

www.tangents.co.uk/ths_podcasts/photoshop/podcast.xml

I’m still not sure how those kinds of links work with various browsers and systems, but you may need to copy and paste the text of the web address into iTunes or similar. If you have a preferred RSS feed aggregator it should open in that though. I think.

Sorry for the geek speak.

I thought it was fascinating when Phil talked yesterday at the end of the event about the fact that, even before we had concluded the plenary for the day’s work, all the attendees Art was already published and available for anyone to see on the Web. That kind of instant, public display of Art is something that really excites me. I think it excites a lot of young people too. Certainly from my experience with using Flickr with the students, there is a lot of excitement generated by the thought that their work is publicly displayed.

It’s such a social activity too, even if it is ‘only’ in a virtual environment. But as I keep saying, young people who have grown up with the existence of the Internet and easy, instant global communications see no distinction between the physical and the virtual. They are both part of the same social network. And this is why I think we need, as educators, to grasp the idea of Social Software and Web 2 technologies to enable student / teacher and student ‘ student interaction.

Anyway, the artwork from yesterday’s session is on the ICT Art Flickr page here. Enjoy.

Friday Working