Brainstorming our Big Idea with Cloudart

After the introduction of the big idea of belonging on the first day of school, I needed fourth grade students to brainstorm and make more personal connections to the idea.  Who or what do they belong to?  What is their heritage?  What family traditions do they have?  I needed students to brainstorm these questions on a personal level for their making meaning project.  Asking 4th grade students to brainstorm answers to these questions would fall under the category of engaging, so I decided to use the app CloudArt.  I've seen it used by other art teachers and it looked like the perfect vehicle to get my students to answer otherwise dry questions. I had them think of 7-10 words that describe how they belong. Students typed these words into the app and they got to "play" with color choice, design and making words smaller or bigger.  CloudArt could be used to teach graphic design, color choice, fonts, and so on, but I merely used it today to get them thinking about answers that I need them to know for our next project.  Brainstorming with beautiful results and students who are engaged...I'll take it! To see our whole gallery of CloudArt check out artsonia.
                                                                                                             

Choice and Research with the iPad

 For the past four years, I have had third grade students create Ohio wildlife animals out of clay.  They also create habitats where playing with materials is encouraged.  Tissue paper turns into a pond and pom poms become rocks.  We even had a nest built in a paper tree for a bald eagle one year!

Each year I have difficulty getting the students to understand what exactly a wildlife animal is and is not.  There is always someone who wants to do a dog or horse.  It takes an inspirational talk for them to understand a stray dog is not exactly what we are going for (although I adopted my own daschund!)

This year, with the power of the iPad and wireless newly installed in my classroom, the students were able to do their own research.  I sent them to the Department of Natural Resources website for Ohio where there was an A-Z species guide.  Students choose their own animal and saved the picture to photo library.  They just touch the picture, and a SAVE IMAGE button appears.  Couldn't be easier!  Each student picked their own animal and wrote down the name.  Then students used a search engine to find more photos for different angles and a close up on the head.

https://www.dropbox.com/

Images were then downloaded into the Dropbox app and immediately appeared onto my computer.  Dropbox has been working extremely well for the transfer of pictures and documents from the iPads to my computer.  I printed them out (I'm lucky to have a colored printer) and laminated them.  I can already tell the results of our project are going to be the best yet, and we will have a greater variety of animals represented instead of the same ten I would have printed off for them.  Students have more information to create with and have a sense of ownership by doing their own research.  To watch our progress on this projects and others visit our school blog!    
 

I'm excited to see how the painting improves from having their own resources to look at!

Every student assumes they know what a turtle looks like, until they can really see it in photographs!