Instructify

BY BILL FERRIS

Aviary, the web-based image-editing suite, used to charge for some premium features like saving private files and allowing access to tutorials. I say “used to” because they’ve stopped charging money for it.

This is a great development for art and design teachers looking for a viable alternative to Adobe Creative Suite. Aviary gives schools the ability to start graphic- and web-design classes without spending a fortune on the software.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Looking to harness your student’s creative energy and possible have them win a college scholarship at the same time? Google is once again staging their Doodle 4 Google competition, letting K-12 students across the country take a crack at redesigning the iconic Google logo. We’ve plugged this competition in the past, but it’s worthy of a re-mention. The theme for this year’s competition is “If I Could Do Anything, I Would …” All of the details about how to register your school and submit entries can be found here.

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BY BILL FERRIS

It’s that time of year again when lazy bloggers rehash old material under the guise of “Best of” lists rather than come up with new stuff. Instructify is no exception.

Below are the top 10 Instructify posts of 2009. The rankings were determined via a combination of Google Analytics, retweets, and the capricious and arbitrary whims of the editor.

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BY BILL FERRIS

Today we’ve got two resources dealing with comics for you:

Before political cartoons devolved into crude drawings depicting a guy wearing a T-shirt labeled “TAXES” and smashing something with a hammer, they were elaborately drawn works of art, and often featured more text than some of today’s news stories. The Hale Scrapbook from The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library maintains an extensive collection of editorial cartoons from Gregorian England. Your students will be able to see the issues of the era as seen through the lenses of the doodlers of the day. Some seem kinda weird. Others show that times really haven’t changed that much.

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BY BILL FERRIS

You can use portfolios for everything from exhibiting student projects to creating a teaching portfolio. Back in my day, though, building a portfolio meant shelling out a few bucks for a three-ring binder and those plastic pageholders — and then I had to spend way more time than I budgeted for stuffing and organizing my work in the binder. Carbonmade takes the hassle out of the portfolio process by letting you or your students set up free, simple portfolios online.

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BY BILL FERRIS

Just because you don’t know web design doesn’t mean you can’t have a nice-looking website. Wix lets you create a Flash-based website from one of their many templates, or build a site from scratch. Here’s a sample site I made in about five minutes. Wix templates allow you to create sub-pages, upload photos, and incorporate animations into your design.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.’”

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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…)