Tag Archives: Interesting Ways

Collaborative visual minutes at #TMNorthants2015

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Collaborative art at TeachMeet Northants 2015

Last week the #TMNorthants2015 took place – you can read more about it here. The visual minutes were made by Jean Edwards and Rebecca Heaton. You can see a video of the finished image below.

The process…

Before the TeachMeet we talked quite briefly with Helen Caldwell to come up with an overall vision for the approach and settled upon circuit boards – taking the green, black, white, yellow and gold colours and the linear patterns as a basis for the visual appearance of the minutes. We aimed for an overall coherence but with lots of room for flexible responses to what would happen at the TeachMeet.

As preparation we collected some images of circuit boards on a Pinterest board and used these to make some different sized and shapes insets to write and draw onto. We also made a a set of smaller ones for the participants to write and draw upon and contribute to the minutes.

2015-02-04 19.44.12At the TeachMeet we were lucky to have a big space to work in, at the back of the hall but with a great overview of the presentations and audience. Just before the presentations began we made some pressprint tiles with some of the lines and patterns from circuit boards and printed and drew onto the huge sheet of paper that would be the backdrop for the minutes.

2015-02-04 19.54.47Once the TeachMeet began there was hardly a moment to stop and think as the ideas and inspiration flowed! Somehow I began to record the presenter ideas and Rebecca worked on the bigger image, incorporating each presentation into the image using printing and drawing. This evolved as we worked – it wasn’t a plan! The experience was intense because of the speed at which the presentations flowed and the variety of ideas to capture. I had to listen very carefully to try to capture the main idea and find a way of showing it on paper – there were some false starts along the way.

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The results… What was really exciting about this experience was how valuable the collaboration became in documenting such a social event. The finished article shared the voices of ourselves as artist-teachers, the opinions of presenters and viewers of the teach meet and the voices of pupil-artists, who learn in our local schools. For us this sums up what a teach meet is about, learning together in collaboration. It also demonstrates how all disciplines of practice: art, technology and education can come together to share ideas through the visual.

We were very lucky that the piece of paper was just about big enough – although I’m sure we had squash a few things on towards the end! It was an exhilarating experience and we hope that the participants feel that we did their ideas justice – as we said some contributions came from participants and pupils, the pupils from Standens Barn Primary were the most enthusiastic helpers. We were very glad that there were two of us working together…. we are looking forward to a new project….

Jean Edwards and Rebecca Heaton (@jeanEd70 @rebeccaonart)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Computing and art

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In our November meeting we explored at how we could use the visual programming language Scratch to create interactive art. One of the key approaches to computing is to remix and reuse, rather than always start from scratch, so to speak, and so there is much to be gained from modifying existing computing projects.

Helen shared this collection of coding and art Scratch projects that we explored in the session.

Screen Shot 2014-11-09 at 15.31.20We also looked at resources from Barefoot Computing on drawing crystal flowers and thought about how these might link with analysing Rangoli, Islamic or Celtic patterns, as well as with aspects of the maths curriculum.

Screen Shot 2014-11-08 at 13.47.07Other webtools that can be used alongside this theme include the online image generator Mutapic and the interactive art tools Weavesilk and Beautiful Curves.

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Screen Shot 2014-11-09 at 15.48.35Alongside these we looked at some of the amazing projects created using digital technology by artists that were featured in recent exhibition at The Barbican, Digital Revolutions.

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VoiceThread

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Voicethread is a super free online tool and app for responding to images. You upload an image, set of images, document or video and then allow others to add comments using their voice or an audio file, via a webcam or through text.

This makes it a particularly good tool for sharing or responding to art. In these examples children are looking at Victorian Art and making written comments. Click on the icons around the sides to see the comments and in the middle to change the image:

Here children are using their voices to talk about Pop Art images:

Or you could ask them to compose a musical response and share using the microphone:

There is a crowd-sourced set of 26 classroom ideas for using VoiceThread in Tom Barrett’s Interesting Ways series.

You can create an educator’s account giving you a class account and the chance to create a set of ‘identities’ for your pupils and you can choose your privacy controls. Find a detailed evaluation of using VoiceThread in the classroom on Patricia Bruder’s blog.