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Online video editor by Microsoft Clipchamp

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Create videos with royalty-free music and stock footage, use video templates, and export in up to 4K video resolution. Get started in-browser or download the Windows app.

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Check out this presentation designed by Katie Fielding.

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We care about your students' privacy. CoSpaces Edu takes student privacy very seriously and is COPPA and FERPA-compliant.

We have several measures in place to make sure that the data that you and your students store in CoSpaces Edu is always kept safe.

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CoSpaces Edu for kid-friendly 3D creation and coding

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Boost your kids' learning experience by letting them invent, build and code their own creations. Runs on mobile, tablet and desktop, including Chromebooks.

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1. Have students write out two of their favorite things on sticky notes
2. Then mix them up and pass out two different ones.
3. Then have the students create a new product or service inspired by these two favorites.

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Make a Bot to give to someone in your community and spread the love, joy, and courage of the Botjoy movement.

In 2014, Gary "let go" of the Bots and invited the world to steal this idea and make their own. Letting the Bots go has reaped big surprises and delights. For example, first graders have made Brave Bots for ambulance drivers to give to sick and hurt kids and Product Designers have made Silly Bots to help someone lighten up and have fun.

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Make a Bot to give to someone in your community and spread the love, joy, and courage of the Botjoy movement. In 2014, Gary "let go" of the Bots and invited the world to steal this idea and make their own. Letting the Bots go has reaped big surprises and delights.

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Get Started

International Dot Day, a global celebration of creativity, courage and collaboration, began when teacher Terry Shay introduced his classroom to Peter H. Reynolds' book The Dot on September 15, 2009.

The Dot is the story of a caring teacher who dares a doubting student to trust in her own abilities by being brave enough to "make her mark". What begins with a small dot on a piece of paper becomes a breakthrough in confidence and courage, igniting a journey of self-discovery and sharing, which has gone on to inspire countless children and adults around the globe.

Each year on International Dot Day - with the help of people just like you - the inspiration continues. What started as a story in the pages of a book is transforming teaching and learning around the world as people of all ages re-discover the power and potential of creativity in all they do.

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International Dot Day, a global celebration of creativity, courage and collaboration, began when teacher Terry Shay introduced his classroom to Peter H. Reynolds' book The Dot on September 15, 2009. The Dot is the story of a caring teacher who dares a doubting student to trust in her own abilities by being brave enough to "make her mark".

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iPad Art Room | 21st Century Teaching and Learning in Visual Art

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I've blogged about the value of tracing before...

Working digitally over a photograph gives students an opportunity to really 'learn to look'.

Here are three lesson seeds that expand on the idea that tracing is terrific!

IDEA 1: Super Silhouettes

Although it may seem simple enough, tracing over parts of the face is an engaging way for students to spend time purposefully exploring shape, form, positive and negative space, etc. This kind of task also presents a valuable starting point for some of the less creatively confident learners - they are off and racing, rather than worrying about their first marks on a blank page.

And it is not easy. You'll see that students will need to think through the process of image construction as they follow contours, find edges, and work with precision. They will need to solve visual problems, perhaps even 'lose their way', and discover that small changes can have a large impact, etc.

In Dan Martinez's Year 4 class we explored the age-old art of silhouette portraiture. Using their own faces, students explored portrait photography techniques, and developed a strong profile shot with the native camera app. This image became the starting point, or first layer, as they created a digital silhouette in the style of Victorian paper cuts.

This student is using Art Set app to create the silhouette, with a strong contrast between white and black. There are a myriad of apps you could use for this, including Adobe Draw, which has some excellent features for this kind of task.

Considering the lesson objectives, you could certainly leave this task there. There are some great potential discussions about contrast, positive and negative space, edges, and layers. But perhaps my favourite conversations surround the method of production here. Students often love to grapple with the thinking around the old and the new, digital and other. In using an incredible technique like this, and considering the history of the medium in this new context, it is fascinating to ponder what is lost, or what is gained as the materials and processes in this work are exploited.

Since we are fortunate enough to have access to a laser cutter, we took the images across to the machine as black and white vectors, and this is the resulting cardboard 'cut-out'. Obviously the creative possibilities are endless here - think stencils, blackboards for goals and ideas, classroom displays that represent student personalities, etc.

IDEA 2: Design Work

In a series of lessons students moved from observational drawing tasks using nature as a stimulus, into a composition that they painted in acrylic. Next, these complex works were simplified, and the strong shapes were reworked into a design for a lino cut print.

By working over the top of a photograph of their painted work, students were able to transform colour, tone, etc into line and shape. By engaging with this task they began to understand relationships in visual language - for example, line allowed shape to emerge, space or contrast created focal points.

Importantly, the success of the previous image did not hinder the construction of this new task - the students were able to expand on the successful elements of their work, or transform it. In doing so, the on-going nature of the creative process is made visible. In combination with 'the undo' button, it's an exciting and empowering way to work.

I have linked to this page before, but if you haven't explored Tony Vincent's post on creating your own avatars and clip art, do so! It is a great set of resources that can really unpack the process we used here.

Tracing and Tearing and Textas!

I've got a whole post on the process behind the lesson you see below, so check it out. We worked across a wicked worksflow, combining many mediums and techniques, selfies to mixed-media animal-hybrid collages created on iPad! Yes, really!

Final Thought

The sky is the limit when you start to consider how apps can connect with hands on practices and processes. I'd love to hear your ideas from here, so please share your thoughts for other teachers in the comments.

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Terrific Tracing on iPad | iPad Art Room

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Although it may seem simple enough, tracing over parts of the face is an engaging way for students to spend time purposefully exploring shape, form, positive and negative space, etc. This kind of task also presents a valuable starting point for some of the less creatively confident learners - they are off and racing, rather than worrying about their first marks on a blank page.

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iPad Art Room | 21st Century Teaching and Learning in Visual Art

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Photography is (wonderfully) more accessible than ever.

When our students have access to the connected camera that is an integral part of our creative mobile devices, the lens becomes an entry point, a conduit between what is placed before it and a myriad of other creative tools. We can go further. Through the camera, students can see their work, and their world, differently.

Here's some ideas that you can explore to extend the potential of that connected camera on your mobile devices for teaching and learning.

See the world differently through filters

Many teachers use photography and mobile devices to seek out or document objects for lesson resources. For example, students may shoot leaves as part of a photographic unit, a record of an investigation or as part of a research project. In these cases, using filters to transform photographs is usually a process of applying filters to images from the camera roll 'post production'.

There are some very different ways of working when we look at 'live filters'.

The images presented on the left were created by a teacher using a leaf to introduce very young students to the difference between light and dark, tone, outline and contour line. By hovering her iPad over a leaf on the floor, and flicking between live filters, she was able to demonstrate, in real time, the differences between these ideas. She had her iPad connected to a projector screen so all the students could see both the 'real' leaf and the changes that occurred as she moved between filters. She was able to engage the students in conversation, zoom in and out, and responsively manage her time. The magic of this moment was a valuable hook for students who were then challenged to find an object and develop a series of photographs that demonstrated their understanding of these concepts. By working through this really active process students were able to grapple with their understanding of what they could see, what they could not, and what they could change.

Use 'live filters' to spark creativity

Using apps that have live camera filters opens up very different creative opportunities. Simply hovering an iPad or phone over an object, pattern or surface, reveals creative potential. The colour, line and contours around students can transform, right before their eyes. It's an inspiring way to work, and some great entry points for other for works are revealed.

Pictures like the kaleidoscopic images being generated in the clip above may spark painting projects, tessellations, cartoons... Here you're seeing an app called Kaleidacam in action, and the real-time reflections that can be manipulated to create amazing effects. For many students this way of working represents a engaging and entirely new way to begin the creative process. Check out this post on kaleido-creations to see what I mean.

As in the image here, students can hover their live filters over their artwork and explore changes. What you see in this screenshot is a portrait drawing through the lens, with the MegaPhoto app presenting a number of 'changed' views. These sorts of opportunities may help a student to move forward in the creative process, change directions, visualise a next step, etc. Sometimes if my students are stuck for ideas, encouraging them to get their phone out and 'hover' can help them move forward.

If you'd like to give this sort of process a try, my two favourite 'live camera' filtering apps are MegaPhoto, and for younger students, OrangeCam.

Use the camera to overcome a 'sketching skill deficit'

Now don't get me wrong, I firmly believe that opportunities to think and design through drawing or sketching can be very worthwhile. However, I also know that for some students, projects that begin with 'pencil planning' can result in immediate and/or compounding barriers.

Opportunities to explore alternatives to sketching during early production phases can boost the creative confidence of students who may believe that their ability to create is limited to their ability to sketch and render from life with accuracy. Sometimes students who have a 'skill deficit' when it comes to drawing frequently opt out early of a lengthy task, or they might not commit to, or get excited about, a multi-step process. They may believe that their capacity to succeed in following steps is compromised. In fact, they may be right; limited engagement through the planning stage can make it really difficult for students to produce a finished product that represents their true capacity.

Many teachers rely heavily on a 'routine' of sketching and brainstorming early in tasks, even requiring students to submit finished sketches before going onto subsequent steps. There are digital alternatives that can provide entry point for students, rather than road blocks, tools that may allow them to show what they can do.

The camera can be a compositional tool

By simply moving their device over a subject, the 'live camera' is full of creative potential for students. As the screen fills, a variety of 'opportunities' are revealed visually. By getting closer, moving further away, exploring angles, students are essentially exposed to a myriad of compositional choices. This is a great time for teachers to seize an opportunity to dive into an exploration of visual language and image construction.

Although students can also use the digital zoom, physically 'getting closer' is somewhat of a departure from SLR-based techniques. Changing size, scale and manipulating the spacial organisation within the picture plane becomes a hands-on process.

The combination of this immediacy and the 'hands-on' way of working can also result in an increased diversity and complexity of compositional trials compared to when students use preparatory sketches. In other words, it's easy for students to experiment, so they often do! The camera gives students instant access to the compositions they can see in their minds eye, and importantly their experiments are recorded in the photo library for review.

EXAMPLE FROM THE CLASSROOM:
"In planning a representational still-life painting, photographing the objects from life in a variety of ways gave students a way to explore a huge variety of options for their canvas. As students played with cropping, focal points, positive and negative space, they made really good choices about their composition. It was exciting for them to see the pictures appearing on-screen, and there is an obvious strength to the way the elements are arranged when they choose the image they will work with the produce their painting. I think that they tried out more ideas than they would have if they were drawing. They might have sketched out a couple of options, but with their cameras they saw literally a hundred different ways they could map arrange their objects and compose their canvas. And they're excited too. A painting like this is going to take them a long time to complete, so I like that that are confident they have got a good starting point and can already 'see' what they're working towards. We used to spend ages sketching, but that wasn't the focus of the lesson and it ate into the time the students could spend on the painting. Some of them even got stuck. Using this process actually took a lot less time, everyone had a plan they'd developed after a really through investigation of the possibilities."

Kevin
A Visual Arts Teacher in China

One last idea...

Student's can learn about the concept of abstraction by 'doing it'. Coming back to the kaleidoscope app I mentioned before, hovering this filter over a representational image breaks it apart.

Students can use this tool over their own works, and instantly see the line, texture, colour etc take over from the shape and form of their familiar objects. New shapes, patterns and possibilities emerge, and often, so does an appreciation of the elements of art.

In this collection of images you can see a student's representation painting, and a variety of photographic investigations, abstractions created with the kaleidoscope camera.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like to think about the opportunities tracing techniques on iPads open up for your learners... check out Terrific Tracing

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Use the iPad Camera... for more than 'Photography'! | iPad Art Room

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Photography is (wonderfully) more accessible than ever. When our students have access to the connected camera that is an integral part of our creative mobile devices, the lens becomes an entry point, a conduit between what is placed before it and a myriad of other creative tools. We can go further.

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https://express.adobe.com/sp/design/post/urn:aaid:sc:US:a5dd0392-6575-407c-a53c-bb43b01bf5c5

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Create with Mr. Needles- Augmented Reality Dot Day Drawing

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This is a great activity for January when I have a lot of new students joining my class.

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Create with Mr. Needles- Untraditional Selfie

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This could be a really good activity for all the new teachers on campus and put it on a padlet for us to be able to see! Or have students make them and print them out for a bulletin board!

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