Blog blog bloggity blog

Well my blog is all submitted and the course is finished. So I thought that I would keep my blog updated with useful things that we have been doing at school, either for others or just for my own reference. Might be quite fun to look back and see what we tried to achieve.

So I have got my students working on their blogs for the last term.... I know, I know...better late than never! It will be an ongoing project for the last few weeks and I will be including it as a Literacy activity so groups of children will be updating most days. So far children have been setting up their accounts and we have done that with just a little bit of fuss! All sorted now though. Firstly they are just writing some simple posts about their favourite things. movies etc. I have left it fairly open so as the children get used to the layout and how to post items. Some children are flying with it already with pictures and graphics being added all the time! I think thats the beauty of blogger, its very simple to just jump right in and if you want to be a little bit fancy you have that freedom as well.

3D awesomess!

Another practical blog, something that I am working on but haven't got around all the fine points yet.With the deluge of 3D movies coming out recently, I wondered if it was possible to create our own 3D images, so i had a look online and found instructions and even a template for making your own 3D glasses. After much backwards and forwards, I have finally figured out how to do it! It is made even more fiddly by the fact that we only have an old copy of Photoshop, so it takes a bit longer than normal. Basically you take one picture and slightly overlay them, put a colour layer of cyan over the left image and then a red layer over the right one. Combine them together and voila! There is your anaglyph. The plan is to talk about the history of 3D, what it has been used for and where it is heading (TVs if you were interested).One of my workmates went to the Armageddon expo on the weekend and said the 3D TV was mind blowing! Check out a video of Sony's offering.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=froIGgjJwOI&feature=related

Here is a sample image of what we will be working on. It's not quite perfect yet but gives an idea of what I mean. Drag out your 3D glasses if you have them! 

Pop Art

Just thought I would post some examples of what we have been working on at the moment. As part of art we studied the work and life of Andy Warhol and in particular his pop art. There is a really good website that has interactive activities for children to work through. It shows Andys progress through the different times of his life.

http://qag.qld.gov.au/kids/activities/online_interactives/warhols_world_online_interactive/interactive

Children used digital cameras to take photos of themselves standing in front of a blank background (in this case the whiteboard) they then imported the photos to iphoto. Next they took the photo and imported it into photoshop and deleted the background. They then changed the threshold to make elements of the photo stand out (in black and white). Then they selected the various parts of the photo, skin, hair, shirt, jumper, etc and altered the colours to create a piece of their own pop art! I was really pleased with the way they turned out and was also surprised how quickly the children became used to using photoshop...its not the most children friendly software out there! 

Here are a couple of examples of our work. Enjoy!