Instructify

BY BILL FERRIS

As the perpetrator of some of the worst handwriting in a fifty mile radius, I’ve grown to love choosing the right font. The right typeface can produce the sort of artful lettering my hands can’t. Or so I thought. FontStruct lets me use my hands (by way of my mouse) to create my own fonts that I can download and use. Oh, okay, so it’s not exactly handwriting, but it’s the most legible thing my hands have ever produced.

FontStruct works via a grid method. Simply fill in the grid with blocks of various shapes to form each letter. Some of the existing fonts on the site allow you to clone them, so you can get a better look at how the magic happens. There are a lot of shapes to try out on the grid, and creating an entire alphabet will take some time, but isn’t it worth it to have your own custom-built typeface?

(more…)

BY BILL FERRIS

Just because all your students aren’t artists, that doesn’t mean they can’t create their own comic strips. ToonDoo makes it easy to create a comic by using stock characters and scenes. If kids would rather provide their own protagonists, ToonDoo makes that a snap, too.

Students can choose from a variety of characters and locales. They can also create their own characters with the TraitR function (the name refers to character traits, as in “trait-er” rather than someone who will tattle on kids for cutting in the lunch line). For more options, kids can use the DoodleR tool to draw directly on the comic panels, or import and manipulate images with the ImagineR function.

(more…)

BY BILL FERRIS

Many years ago, Walt Disney drew a little cartoon mouse who in turn built a theme park with his own four-fingered hands. Or something. Today, your elementary students can create cartoons of their own, as well as stories, drawings, cards and more at Kerpoof, an online creativity site brought to you by Disney.

Kerpoof gets kids creating with a simple interface that has a surprising amount of options. The movie section is particularly impressive — you can have several characters onscreen at once, and direct their movement, actions and speech. Compared to online animation tool Xtranormal, Kerpoof gives you far more control over your characters — Xtranormal’s free version only allows two characters, and they can’t walk around. However, Kerpoof doesn’t allow you to switch camera angles, nor do the characters have voice simulation (which may be a positive, depending on your point of view). (more…)

BY BILL FERRIS

As school budgets dwindle and schools focus on high-stakes testing in core subjects, some schools see art programs as the go-to budgets to slash. Fortunately, there are a lot of tools and projects out there for art teachers that don’t cost a dime. The following are five of Instructify’s favorite free tools for art teachers.

(more…)

BY BILL FERRIS

Check out these upcoming educational grants, as listed on Grant Wrangler.

Last minute:

Gladys Marinelli Coccia Awards — Deadline August 1
This award recognizes young (14 to 17-year-old) female social entrepreneurs who start enterprises for the common good. The winner receives $2,000 for the enterprise, travel, and access to social enterprise resources from Youth Service America.

(more…)

BY BILL FERRIS

Picking a good color scheme is, for me, like calculus — an ordered, complex set of laws that I’ll never, ever understand. Thankfully I can use cheats like referring to the color wheel, or this slick online Color Scheme Designer. Just move your cursor around the color wheel to find your central hue, choose between mono, complement, triad, tetrad, analogic or accented analogic, whatever those mean, and CSD will present you a selection of colors that will look great on our class blog, bulletin boards, art projects, school newspapers, activity T-shirts, or even your daily wardrobe (if you’re like me, you’ll need a lot of schemes based on khaki).

(more…)

BY BILL FERRIS

I like construction paper on classroom bulletin boards as much as the next guy. Cut-out letters on a solid background are a classic look. But consider for a moment what your bulletin board would look like if it instead had a six-foot by four-foot picture of the solar system, or a huge reproduction of a Van Gogh. You can do that and more easily and cheaply at BlockPosters.

(more…)

BY BILL FERRIS

Set course for Wikipedia! Facebook ahoy! And so on. These quaint nautical terms arose from a time when people depended on maps and charts much more crude than the Mapquest and GPS-enabled phones to which we’ve grown accustomed. The internet, a mistress as untamable as the seven seas of yore, is the subject of the Internet Mapping Project, a modern-day cartographic endeavor commissioned by Kevin Kelly, author of the Cool Tools blog and lots of other ‘net niftiness. Kelly has called for amateur Rand McNallys everywhere to “Please draw a map of the internet, as you see it. Indicate your ‘home.’”

(more…)

Fun test gauges color vision

BY BILL FERRIS

Test your students’ color vision with the Munsell Hue Test. Here’s how it works: the test presents four bars of color tiles, with different hues at each end. Your students must try to put the colors in order to form a gradient between the two shades. (more…)

Edit, add effects, create vector graphics and choose color palettes

BY NICK YINGLING

Human eyeballs are delicate organs, while bird talons are razor sharp and unforgiving. Go ask the citizens of Bodega Bay if you don’t believe me. Or ask this actress.

In the aesthetic world of visual design, though, a bunch of birds can be your eyeballs’ best friends. Aviary, a free image editing suite, is a great resource for you to do visual design. Everything is web-based, which not only allows you to save space on your system but also allows you to use the program on any computer, anywhere.

(more…)

Six Ways to Transform your Presentation
I’m still learning the whole presentation thing. I’ve probably made every classic presentation mistake, from mumbling to mistaking my PowerPoint slide show for an outline. Stepcase Lifehack has a great list of presentation tips for n00bs like me. Number one: ditch PowerPoint. I tried this for my last presentation and found it very liberating. This info will help you prepare a conference presentation, make your daily teaching more engaging, or come in handy for the forensics team.

26 Must-Have Free Fonts
Have you deleted Comic Sans from your computer yet? If not, I’ll wait here while you do that. Good. Now that that overused typeface is out of your life forever, what will you use for your bulletin boards and newsletters? Presidia Creative brings you 26 free fonts that will make your art projects and handouts look more slick. You’ll never need Comic Sans again.

Five Best Free Data Recovery Tools
Nothing places hard drives in more peril than finals week. At this time of year, the vengeful god Murphy inflicts horrible maladies upon the data of students and teachers worldwide for not heeding his law. Fortunately, atonement is within reach. Lifehacker has a rundown of five data-recovery tools that can bring Little Johnny’s term paper back to life just in time for him to print it out so his dog can eat it. -BILL FERRIS

Photo credit: Photocapy on Flickr.

The Panamericana School of Art and Design created a clever ad campaign that would make a great exercise for your art class. It’s simple, too. The test consists of a sheet of paper with a series of Xs or Os. Students are challenged to use these letters as starting points to create as many drawings as they can.

It’s a beautifully simple idea, and would make a great activity to start your class, not unlike a journal entry in English comp. FYI, some of the drawings may not be appropriate for your students, so you may want to take the idea without sending them there. Are you already using ideas like this one? Let us know in the comments! -BILL FERRIS

School of Art and Design Creativity Test via Toxel.com

Related stuff:

Spin the color wheel to make art projects look great

Lightning Bug lights up your writing ideas

How often have you found yourself thinking about screen printing projects? Not that much, I’d guess. Well check out this awesome idea. If that doesn’t get you motivated to transfer some print ideas of your own I don’t know what will.

This guide to DIY Screen Printing on Instructables takes you through the process from start to finish. Not even just start to finish, it’ll tell you what supplies you need beforehand and how to clean up after you’re done. This project says that the supplies will cost less than $10, so that’s not a bad cost to cover.

Instructables will rope you into registering with their site to get access to additional images and additional access. Don’t sweat this — registering a username with them is quick, painless and you won’t be bombarded with spam emails. The handiest of those extra materials is a PDF file for you to download, allowing you to print it and take it in to the classroom.

This project seems like an obvious fit for an art classroom, you don’t need me to point that out. But last time I checked, schools also still have sports teams and various student organizations. How much would it cost to send away for a bulk order of t-shirts? I don’t know. But how about this scenario: you buy the blank shirts, buy the $10 for DIY screen printing supplies, and make the shirts on the cheap. Meanwhile, the rest of the group thinks you’ve sent the order off to a professional place…you pocket the difference!* -NICK YINGLING

*Editor’s note: Embezzlement is illegal. Neither Instructify nor Nick Yingling advise or condone illegal activities (though sometimes Nick will encourage people to perform illegal acts because he is a twisted manipulator of others. Think of a sort of Loki/Pan trickster character). You will be a terrible jerk if you steal and betray your colleagues’ trust. Besides, your organization will probably ask for receipts.

DIY Screen Printing on Instructables

Related stuff:

Turn Useless Totes into Stylish Messenger Bags

Do It Yourself Learning

Create Liquid Ice Sculptures

Ancient Civilization from the British Museum is a beautifully done interactive site looking at different civilizations from China to America, and everything in between (including Ancient Africa south of Egypt).

The material is presented as six themes covering religion, technology, trade, writing, building and cities. Each section has an overview write-up, then students can see examples by picking a highlighted area from the map. The sub-sections include illustrations and examples so when they talk about pyramids, for example, they can a explore an interactive model of a pyramid, with a more detailed map of Ancient Egypt to provide background.

In addition, if students click on the clock at the bottom of the screen, a time line will appear. Clicking on the globe at the bottom brings up all the civilizations covered on the site.

It’s a really robust site with great information in nice digestible bites for kids or adults who want something more engaging a dusty old book to learn from. -ALICE MERCER

Ancient Civilization from the British Museum

Related stuff:

Friends, Romans, teachers, lend me your computers: Ancient Rome 3D

Explore Early Civilizations with BBC Ancient History

It’s All Greek (Mythology) to Me

Photo credit: David Paul Ohmer on Flickr.

Hello and greetings once again from my undisclosed, fortified location. As will happen from time to time, I started to feel the authorities closing in all around me. Men sporting both mustaches and sunglasses would stare at me for much longer than usual, ATMs would reject my cards, small electronic devices kept showing up in my apartment — I was getting the fear. Once again, I was in the grips of paranoia and panic because of copyright worries.

Phony intrigue aside, that weird déjà vu feeling is bound to creep up on you when you’re selecting an image for use. Have I seen this McDonalds Golden Arches®™© symbol somewhere before?  TinEye reverse image search engine is a great tool to help you trace images back to their original source (and, in some cases, a higher resolution version that’s better than the one you started out with).

TinEye has plugins available for both Firefox and IE, as well as bookmarklets for other browsers, so you won’t need to keep returning to the main page to copy in a URL. That should save you a lot of time when you stumble across an image on the web.

Because TinEye is the first search engine to let you see how an image is being used by different users, you can really show students how images can evolve. This can effectively demonstrate the ideas of image accountability and integrity. Have your students search a somewhat notorious company’s logo, such as Enron, and see how it has been modified. That opens the door for  you to field questions about trademarked logos being used for satire and parody. Aren’t you glad that I’m providing you with more work now? — NICK YINGLING

TinEye

Related stuff:

What’s fair in fair use?

Grab photos for free at Compfight