Clouds of words

Here's the tag crowd of my philosophy of art education. Pretty, isn't it?

addition aesthetics arts believe changing context creative culture deeply disciplines education employed enrich essential explore express global history human language means nature offers oneself opens opportunity passionately past paves personal places present problem provides safe seems sense society solving students support thinking throughout understand universal unparalleled visually window

created at TagCrowd.com

Wordcloud is a similar program - http://www.wordle.net/

Here's a website with an idea for using word cloud in a lesson plan: http://www.boxoftricks.net/?p=103
This entry on the website Teaching with Technology has a bunch of other possible ideas: http://tcoffey.edublogs.org/2008/08/17/wordle-word-clouds/

Free program for making moodboards

This promises to be lots of fun, particularly for design projects. This program enables you to collect images of all kinds, off the internet or uploaded and compile them into moodboards. I can see this being a really valuable tool for teaching visual brainstorming - useful in any kind of commercial art and design projects - interior, fashion, graphic, etc. It will appeal to the preference for appropriation and recontextualizing of material that is pretty distinct in teen students as well.

Watch this space for my own gloriously moody examples!

Image spark - http://www.imgspark.com/

Finding connections

This is an excellent article on finding the best blogs in the subjects one's interested on. And, as luck would have it, the topic happens to be education.  Social Media cheat sheet from Read Write Web.

The best things in life are free

We're all familiar with the gold standard of creative software, Adobe. And it's hard to argue with Photoshop, Illustrator and Dream Weaver. However, if your budget can't accommodate software that costs more than a decent PC, there are options.

There is Gimp, for example. I've been using it for years as a poor man's Photoshop. It allows one to take an image and manipulate it in layers. It's not as refined as the Adobe program, but it's a great way to introduce students to image capture and manipulation for free.

Here is the download page.

There is a program similar to Illustrator, using bezier curves, called Gestalter. I'm not sure it is still available, I am having trouble finding a reliable download..

Apparently the animation program, Blender, is supposed to be excellent. I haven't tried it, but it's free.