Creative Expression - Visual Expression in Ink Pad

Ink Pad is a free app that allows you to create and save vector illustrations, much like Adobe Illustrator.
For this activity, I uploaded a painting done by one of my students to make a poster for our upcoming art show.  I created three layers.  One for the painting, one for the paintbrush I drew and one for all of the text.

It took a little bit to get used to how the tools worked, but this is what I created, which I then saved in my photos.  This is how it turned out. I actually made this is less than 15 minutes.  I think I will probably go back in and add some more information and change the lines of text before I actually display this poster.

I really think that elementary students will have a hard time understanding the layers and using the tools.  Creating vector art is much different than just drawing a picture in a drawing app.  If I did use this in my classroom, I think I would have students add text to their drawings to create posters like this.  Maybe they could add their name with a painted background or something.

Content Area

Evaluating Apps
It is helpful to use a standard rubric or checklist when evaluating apps.  I downloaded this checklist and evaluated the Educreations app. Here is a screenshot of the checklist.

Finding Apps

You wouldn't think that finding apps that are appropriate for Art would be difficult...and it's not, really.  The problem is that there are so many! There are several sites and blogs that review educational apps.  These are great resources and help narrow down your search.  I used Teachers With Apps to find three new apps to try in the art room.  

BugArt is a creative app where kids can draw and create with a variety of tools. Guided drawing practice is also a feature in this app.  This app costs $.99.

Drawp for School is an interactive app where students can create drawings and share them with their teacher or classmates. This app is free.

Mini Monet is a creative app that provide motivators for keeping student interest and the self-satisfaction of making original art. I downloaded the lite version and decided to upgrade to the full version.  You can get the full version for $1.99.  In the full version you are able to share masterpieces.  There are also many features you can unlock by upgrading.

Here is the evaluation I did of this app with the same checklist I used above.

When I looked up the Mini Monet App in the Apple volume purchase program, it was only listed as the free version.  So I'm not sure how that would work if you wanted to be able to use the full version.

I think that using this method of a checklist or rubric to determine the best apps to buy, especially for a whole school's use, is a wise idea.  There are a lot of apps available and you want to be buying the ones that are going to promote higher order thinking skills. Also, if there are several apps a school wishes to purchase, the rubric evaluation could really help prioritize the list and help plan for budgeting for money to buy them.

Enhanced Student Response Systems

InfuseLearning is a web-based assessment. I think this will be something I will use in my assessments.  I really like how I am able to upload pictures for the questions.  I think the drawing response feature is perfect for Art class, as well...though, I haven't quite figured out how that works yet.  I will be pursuing that a little further.
For my artifact for InfuseLearning, I created a class with 5 students.  After I had added the students I created a four question quiz. I used two different types of questions, true or false and multiple choice.

Once I had the quiz set up,I logged in as a student and completed the quiz.  Just like Socrative, you can see the quiz results in real time through the teacher side.  I like the ability to monitor the students in this application.  Here is a screenshot of one of the quiz questions.

And these are the results of the quiz.

As I mentioned before, I think I will be able to use InfuseLearning in my classroom for learning assessments where I have to show growth.  It will make testing and grading assessments for my students so much faster. If I were to begin using an assessment tool tomorrow, I would choose InfuseLearning.  I think it is more adaptable to what I need and the student interface seems easy for the students I teach.

Student Response Systems...Socrative

Using the iPad to collect data can impact instruction.  I have tried the Socrative app as a Student Response System.  Socrative has a teacher version and a student version.  In the teacher version you can create and manage and run tests.   You can see the data in real time as you are collecting it from the students, and you can email yourself reports of the data collected.
I created two assessments. The first was a 6 question quiz about Color.  I had two of my kids and my niece take the quiz.  The report is not right, because I skipped the step of checking the box that was the correct answer.  Oops.  All my students got 100% because there was no right answer!  I went back and changed it after the fact, but noticed that the report wouldn't change.
This screenshot was taken during the test as a student was answering the questions.

I then sent a report of the results...this is when I realized my mistake about not checking the boxes 

that were the right answers.

I also created a single question response quiz.  I really like this feature. I think it would be a great idea to poll the class or vote on something.  My daughter mentioned that her teacher uses it as a question of the day.  I also noticed that not only could you selected responses in real time as students were responding, but you could then do a vote.  

As students logged in, then it gave them all of the student responses as choices for the vote.

I was able to send a report of the results of the vote as well.

I think that this would work great for quick assessments, exit tickets or a question of the day like I mentioned, even collaborative work where students are brainstorming ideas and then voting on the a favorite. I love the immediate response you can get with this app.  I would use this if I had more students who had access to the iPad every day, like in a one-to-one program. I don't think it would work well or be time efficient with only two iPads.

Universal Design for Learning: Guided Access

Guided Access is a great feature on the iPad for when students are using apps in the classroom.  Why I like Guided Access is that you can lock students into an app that does not allow them access to any other app. I also like that you can block out areas that you don't want them to use, for example: in-App purchases, connecting to the internet, or settings may be features in an app that I would not want my students to click on.  In the art room, I often will have students using more than one app to create their digital art. If I was using Guided Access, this would not be possible without typing in the password every time.  You could also run into the problem of students understanding how Guided Access works and that they may set it up and lock the iPad into an app and the teacher wouldn't know the password, which made it so you couldn't turn Guided Access off. I'm sure there is some way around that, but my son came home yesterday and said that this happened in his 4th grade classroom and that his teacher was pretty upset about it and no one would admit to it so that they could find out the password. I would be most likely to use the Guided Access with kindergarten and first grade, I think.  But using Guided Access would limit us to just creating things and not having evidence of them.  A lot of the apps we use, I end up taking screenshots of what they make...and I noticed that in Guided Access you are not able to use that feature.

Universal Design for Learning: Text-to-Speech/Speak Selection

Here I've enabled Speak Selection in my settings. I was then able to find an article, highlight selected text and it spoke the text.  This is super easy to do, though I had to make some adjustments with the speaking rate

I went to a website and found the article above.  I just highlighted the text and it spoke the article.  I think that this would be very helpful for reading. In the classroom, students can hear text as it's being read. I also like the feature of how the word that is being read is highlighted. I think this could help with reading fluency as well as comprehension. If I created ebooks for my students that relate specifically to lessons and skills they will have to learn, they are not limited by their reading levels.  They can simply sit down with a pair of headphones and with Speak Selection, they are able to listen to the directions or the lesson again.  I also think that it would be great for research on a particular topic.  Students could find an article on line and then use Speak Selection to have it read to them.

Universal Design for Learning: Speech to Text

The iPad’s built in accessibility features are free, and designed to support all users.  They are universal in scope, meaning that we all use them at one time or another. The iPad’s accessibility features allow each user to customize the device to meet their needs and preferences. Among other things, users can customize settings to view websites clutter-free, enlarge font, zoom in to see close up, have text read aloud, speak to write, adjust the background color, use abbreviation expansion and limit a user's access to specific apps/pages. 

The iPad has some universal features built in that can assist with learning.  The first one I am going to be presenting here is Speech-to-Text, and specifically Dragon Dictation. To use this app, I had to first download it to my iPad.  I found Dragon Dictation easy to use. What I don't like, is that some of the words get mixed up or misinterpreted and sometimes It takes more time to go back in and add punctuation and Capital letters and change the words.  I find that this app that is supposed to save me time, doesn't really do the job.  I made this screencast about the app and how I tried to use it.  I was thinking it might be great for a lot of typing up of artist statements that I need to do for the art show.  Unfortunately, it turns out that it's actually faster for me to type them out on the keyboard on my computer than to try the speech-to-text.