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.
BY BILL FERRIS
Pics4Learning is another handy resource for teachers who need images to use in class that: 1) look cool, and 2) won’t get them in trouble for copyright violations. According to the Pics4Learning site, “Unlike many Internet sites, permission has been granted for teachers and students to use all of the images donated to the Pics4Learning collection.” No fuss, no muss, and most importantly, no cease-and-desist letters from angry copyright holders.
BY BILL FERRIS
For this month’s random roundup, we’ve selected the Library of Congress, our nation’s storehouse of pretty much everything worth knowing. As you’d expect, a lot of great resources for teachers have been derived from the Library. See your tax dollars at work by reading the articles linked after the jump.
BY BILL FERRIS
It’s hard to believe that Google figured out how to search for my house from space before getting around to searching for photos licensed under Creative Commons1. According to the Google Operating System blog (not affiliated with Google), Google Image Search now lets you narrow your results to pics that carry the Creative Commons license. Hey, better late than never.
As a reminder that things can always get worse, the Library of Congress has released several photos from the Great Depression on the photo-sharing site Flickr. The LOC has posted some of the most frequently requested photos from their collection as free digital images in their FSA/OWI Favorites set. Like other LOC photo collections on Flickr, you and your class can tag and comment to your heart’s content.
Check out these upcoming educational grants, as listed on Grant Wrangler.
Samsung Focus on Learning Grant Program — Deadline: June 15
Need a Samsung 850DX document camera? Samsung is giving away 50 of them to educators who can demonstrate a need for them.
Universe Adventure Student Video Contest — Deadline: June 15
The Berkley Center for Cosmological Physics and the Honeywell Corporation will give $1,500 in money and new equipment to the students who can create a YouTube video that “demonstrates one of the key fundamental scientific principles or physical laws that governs cosmology or astrophysics in the universe.”
Thomson Gale TEAMS Award –Deadline: June 15
Thomson Gale and the Library Media Connection will award $2,500 cash to three K-12 public or private school teachers who have collaborated with media specialists in the past school year.
New Science Teacher Academy — Deadline: June 30
Second- and third-year science teachers can become a fellow at the New Science Teacher Academy for one year by winning this grant from the National Science Teacher Association.
Coca-Cola Foundation Education Grants –Deadline: Rolling
Coke will support all kinds of educational causes, including dropout prevention, maintaining water quality, recycling and maintaining access to education programs. Plus there’s no deadline. Take a look at their application guidelines and see what you can propose. -BILL FERRIS
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
It’s time again for our random roundup. This month’s theme: NASA, pioneers of space and subjects of an awful lot of posts.
Do-it-yourself is in, even with podcasting at NASA!
It seems that every time you turn around these days someone’s encouraging you to complete a DIY project. Why pay for someone else to do it when you can do it yourself? Apparently, NASA has the same attitude on its website on Do-It-Yourself Podcasts.
Set the controls for the closest planet to the sun: NASA Mission to Mercury
This site includes up-to-the-minute clocks that record the elapsed time of the mission as well as the Orbit Insertion time. Watch the actual August 3, 2004 launch of Messenger from mission control. You can take your class through a tour of images already taken by Messenger as it zooms toward Mercury.
Blast Off with the NASA Kids’ Club
NASA Kids’ Club is a great way to learn more about space exploration. It’s got great pictures, games and activities that will pique the interest of space-minded kids. As a no-cost way to learn about the space program, the NASA Kids’ Club is the Right Stuff.
Observe NASA’s Earth Observatory
What if we were able to turn our telescopes around and get a closer look at what is happening right below our feet? The folks at NASA have done just that with their Earth Observatory site. Teachers, head right for the Experiments tab and give your students interactive ways to study global warming and plant biomes around the world. If you love reading blogs (and I know you do!), check out the Expedition to Siberia blog that offers almost daily updates and pictures of this fascinating trip.
Cool satellite image from the inauguration
Check out this great picture from the presidential inauguration. As the GeoEye-1 satellite hurtled through the cosmos, it took this snapshot to commemorate the historic occasion. That’s a lot of people! Not only that, I now know the roof of the Capitol is tarheel blue.
Observe Mars in 3D
Still have some of those promotional 3D glasses kicking around from after the Superbowl? Fire up one of NASA’s 3D image galleries to take your students on a tour of Mars.
Do you need some images to use for class, but don’t want to upset the copyright police? Compfight (that’s “comp” as in “complimentary”) lets you search thousands of photos on the photo-sharing site Flickr that are licensed under Creative Commons for non-commercial use — basically, as long as you credit the photographer and you don’t use the photo to make a profit, you’ll be fine.
Compfight works much the same as flickrCC and FlickrStorm. The interface is simple and shows a huge amount of photos at once, which is one advantage over flickrCC. You can also adjust your search terms, so if you need some images for your startup software company, you can find a few pics for that as well. There’s also a safe search mode, which filters out offensive images, kinda. I don’t recommend searching for photos live in front of your students. However, it’s perfect for when you need a few photos for tomorrow’s lesson. -BILL FERRIS
Find a Smorgasbord of Free Photos at flickrCC
I wasn’t able to get back to the NCTIES conference today, but I’ve still got some material from Thursday. Tammy Worcester talked about a topic near and dear to my heart in her presentation “Cell Phones in the Classroom.”
Worcester began by asking us if we had our phones with us. In most social situations, this question is followed by “Please turn them off,” but she said we’d be using them during the presentation, so we should get them ready. I did, eager for an opportunity to show off my geektastic Android phone. (I kept hoping someone would notice it so I could bore them about how cool it is. Nobody noticed, which is probably for the best.)
Worcester first demonstrated GOOG-411, which Instructify has reviewed before but is worth bringing up again. It works like a free, automated 411 service. Ask for a business or business category, say your city and state, and Google will connect you for free. As a bonus, you can say “text” and Google will send you a text message with the business’ address and phone number. Slick, huh?
Speaking of Google, check out their SMS page for how to get lots of info by sending a text message. You can send a text message to 466453 (GOOGLE) to get weather updates, word definitions, movie showtimes, all kinds of stuff. For a full list of Google phone fun, no matter what sort of smart phone you use, head to www.google.com/mobile.
If you have email on your phone, try making blog posts via email on your Blogger account (other blog services may also have this feature, but I’m unaware — let us know if they do!). On the Dashboard, if you click on Settings and Email you can set up an email address that, if you send an email to it, will post your emails directly to the blog. You’ll probably want to keep that address a secret, but Worcester set up a demo blog and gave us the address so we could try it out. If you’ve got a camera phone, it’ll also post pictures. This would be handy for a photo assignment for students — ask them to take a picture about, say, an indigenous animal and post it to the blog with comments, for example.
Worcester also pointed out the mobile podcasting service Gabcast, which lets you make a podcast directly from your cell phone. It costs around $10 for 100 minutes of recording time, which isn’t bad but you can probably find a free service somewhere online.
Finally, Worcester covered Poll Everywhere, a service that lets you set up live polls in which students (or whoever) can vote via text message. You can embed the poll results in your blog, website or PowerPoint presentation. Poll Everywhere is free so long as you have 30 or fewer poll respondents. However, those 30 people can take as many polls as you’d like to set up. Alice Mercer covered this one back in July, but once again, a friendly reminder never hurts.
All in all, it was a very informative presentation that explored what cell phones can do for education. So even if I didn’t get to show off my geek phone, I now know a few new tricks it can do. -BILL FERRIS
For more info, check out Tammy Worcester’s website
Online handouts from her NCTIES session (which technically aren’t handouts, but are technically useful)
Ask the readers: phones in class
Top 6: Using cell phones in school
Use cell phones to poll your students
Google Local Voice Search: Dialing 411 Just Got a Little Longer
Photo credit: Milica Sekulic on Flickr.
Would you like to see attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion? How about watching C-beams glittering near the Tannhauser Gate? Sure, we all would! Sadly, for all of us, affordable and convenient space travel probably won’t happen in our lifetimes. But that’s not to say we can’t enjoy some cool visuals right now!
UK artists Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt, working under the name Semiconductor, stumbled across an intriguing image of the Sun. This led to them wanting to learn more about the image, which then led to archives full of data packages, all of which eventually because their Brilliant Noise project.
Between the crisp black and white images and the grainy stop-motion footage, its definitely a reminder of that creepy video from The Ring. They produced their audio samples from the intensity of the solar radio signals that were present. The final effect combines to create some loud squelches and ominous drones while you’re watching some very surreal images.
This video makes a pretty cool visual if you’re teaching about space. This is all the more true because it shows an end product made from some individually obscure sources.
Be sure to check out their other projects, too! They have other fascinating works which combine science and photography. -NICK YINGLING
If you only knew the power of the dark side of science: The physics of the Death Star
Photo credit: Semiconductor Films on Flickr.
The creative folks at Photojojo have come up with the Super-Secret Photo Projects Just for Kids! which is wittily subtitled, “Back Off, Grownups.” They have three great project/shot suggestions,
These are all great ideas, but the genius of the piece is that it written directly to kids, so assuming Photojojo is unblocked in your district, you can have the kids read it themselves. Each suggestion gives easy-to-understand how-to tips written to kids. They even wrap the pitch around the idea of being like a super hero with secret powers. Brilliant idea, brilliantly pitched. If you’re looking for a foot in the door to introduce students to photography, this is it. Here are a couple of shot ideas of my own:
Super-Secret Photo Projects Just for Kids!
Learn the Rules of Photography Composition
Photo credit: tomasu.co.uk on Flickr
Sharing photos on a class website or as evidence for your teaching portfolio is a great way to highlight what’s happening in your classroom. Often, parents, teachers, and school districts worry about privacy violations when the issue of photos and other student work comes up, and it never fails that the kid with the most FERPA restrictions is the one that ends up in every photo. An easy way to anonymize those students and their work is to use the free photo editing tool, Picnik. You can use the standard black bars, if you want, but Picnik also has the option to use stickers (clip art that can be resized and placed anywhere on the image), textboxes, and even freehand doodling to make those hidden kids look less criminal than if you used the black bars. If you’re sharing examples of student work, you can easily block out the students’ names. It’s yet another program that lives in the cloud, so it works on Mac, Windows, and Linux. A premium version offers additional fonts and tools, and costs $24.95 a year — much less than more well-known products.
Separate from using the tool to keep everything legal on your site, kids can use it to create and embellish photos that they take. Because Picnik integrates with several major online photosharing sites (flickr, webshots, photobucket, and others) as well as letting you upload directly, it’s easy to get started. It doesn’t even require you to register! The tight integration with flickr sets it apart from other free photo editors. Used in conjunction with flickr, you can edit your photos and save them back to your account (in flickr, just click on “Edit Photo” from the choices above your photos) and take advantage of the privacy settings that flickr allows you to set up.
And, if you’re trying to figure out whether or not you should post student photos and work, this post from Scott McLeod’s blog “Dangerously Irrelevant” gives a good overview for determining who and what can be seen, and how to set up a policy beforehand. -GRETCHEN SCHAEFER
Another online photo editor? Sure, why not. Presenting Pixlr
Check out this great picture from yesterday’s inauguration. As the GeoEye-1 satellite hurtled through the cosmos, it took this snapshot to commemorate the historic occasion. That’s a lot of people!
Not only that, I now know the roof of the Capitol is tarheel blue. -BILL FERRIS
2009 Inaugural Celebration. Washington D.C. National Mall via GeoEye.com
[UPDATE: Here's another great photo, courtesy of Popular Science.]
Sometimes it seems as though the main thing kids (and adults) need to learn about history is that it really happened, to real people, people not so different from us. Never in all of history has it been easier to make this point with primary sources, more of which go online every day. One recent historic addition to this global archive at our fingertips is the LIFE magazine photo collection, now on the web courtesy of Google.The front page of the LIFE photo archive gives some terrific introductory browses, by decade or by a few chosen topics. To search only the LIFE photos, you can visit this page or else enter “source:life” in a regular Google Images search. Perhaps best of all, all the pictures seem to be available in large, high-resolution versions, and all of them seem have useful information prominently displayed, such as the date the photograph was taken and the name of the photographer. It would have been nice if copyright information about the photos were as easy to find; under the current copyright laws, it is a fair use for educators to put any of these photos in classroom-only materials, but it’s not clear whether they can be reproduced on an open website or in a book, for instance.
One wonderful thing about the LIFE photos is that they’re works of art as well as of American history; the magazine’s photographers routinely collected entirely justified awards. Some of the gorgeous photos I found by browsing include a picture of a bare-chested Picasso with a flower behind his ear, a picture of children of Japanese ancestry on their way to a WWII internship camp, and a picture of famed socialite and photographer Lee Miller in full soldier kit sitting on a piece of rubble. But why not look around for yourself? A search is worth a thousand words. — AMANDA FRENCH
LIFE photo archive hosted by Google
View Library of Congress photos on Flickr
View historical photos from the 1900s at Shorpy
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