Of all the teaching resources to be found online, I am most excited about these few fun and free tools that could be put to great use by artist teachers!
- Xtranormal Text-to-Movie is great little program that lets you and your students, imagine up little movies and create them for free, using your own script and direction. Choose your actors, their accent, their actions, their words, the set, the music, just about everything! An easy and effective tool for visually teaching ideas or letting your students express their own ideas and understanding through.
- Classroom Architect provides a super easy platform for creating and planning your classroom floor plan. It lets you save several plans and print them with the click of a button. A super useful tool for teachers with limited space! Here is a sample floor plan I threw together:
- Picnik is a quick and dirty photo editing program that is both free and requires no software! Simple and easy edits can be done right there in the browser!
- Art Babble is a fabulous resource for artist teachers striving to add some contemporary media to their lessons. It the youtube for all things art! From full length artist lectures from places like the Hammer Museum to new interviews and footage of artists like Catherine Opie to artistic research video such as those done by the Van Gogh Museum, it has so much to offer to those of us teaching in the arts! I'm fond of this clip of photographer, Henry Wessel, talking about his photographic process, shooting from cars.
- Skitch is one of my favorite tools, that makes creating powerpoints, visual aides, and blogging so much easier! Not to mention, making image sharing fun! Skitch takes screenshots of your desktop, browser, or whatever you happen to be looking at on your computer. Not only can you quickly grab these images, you can add arrows, captions, and sketches to these images. Jing is a similar free service that also takes screen videos in addition to still images, but the Skitch application comes with an adorable pink heart icon, how could you say no?
