Art Generator of October 2011

 

Sketchcast is a new way to express yourself. You can draw or sketch something and record yourself doing it WITH OR WITHOUT voice. There are lots of possibilities with this tool. You can explain stuff, make tutorials or simply have fun while drawing or making art. The finished sketchcast can be shared via email or can be embedded in a blog. You will need to register in order to use this tool, but registration is free and quite easy. You can learn more about using this tool here.

Sneaking in Learning: There are really tons of activities you can use this tool in. Fro language practice, have the child draw something and describe their art. I like to use this tool in our Arabic lessons. Or children can make tutorials and how-tos. Another great way to use this tool is to let them explain mathematical and scientific concepts as end of project assessments. You can also watch others’ sketchcasts, for inspiration or to learn as many people have made tutorials on different stuff using this tool.

Art Generator Of June

BioLaboratory is an interactive Petri dish, where you can play with different types of cells. You can change their attributes, relationship between them and attract them with biomagnetic field. And it is so much fun! You can make different color cells, with different kinds of cell membrane and watch them while they push and pull and get mixed up and so on!

Sneaking in learning: This can be a perfect warm up when studying cells and their properties.

Art generator of May

Challenge the imagination and creative thinking of your kids with this superb resource, klowdz. When you enter the site, you're given a picture of some clouds. See what that cloud in the picture looks like. Is it a castle or a cottage, a flower or a cabbage! Then you set to work and use some different drawing tools to add detail to what you "see" in your clouds. Tools like furry lines, curvy lines, simple lines and chrome can also be adjusted for size and colour. If you're not happy with your creation, you can clear and start again. Can’t see a thing in the cloud? No problem! Just press the cloud icon and choose another cloud picture. You can save to your computer as a jpg, or join the site and save to their online gallery, which gives you a url to share with your friends. No joining necessary if you just want to play, and save to your own computer. There is also a gallery of drawings based on cloud pictures made by others. Don’t forget to follow up by lying with your kids on the grass and watch clouds drift by.

Sneaking in learning:  Challenging kids to recognise or imagine shapes in the clouds is not only fun, it also encourages creative thinking and develops their imagination muscles. If your kids are interested you can always write stories about the pictures you see in clouds. I would recommend keeping the pictures and stories inside the world of realm and not to encourage fantasy. For kids who like to play with photoshop or other such softwares, here and here are great tutorials on making cloudy letters. And to point out the obvious, it can be a great warming up activity when studying weather, water cycle, atmosphere etc.

Art Generator of April

Post-it-game is not so much of an art generator as an online pictionary game. Once you get to the site, you will be given an option to register, so you can create your own nick name and save your score or you can play without registering, in which case you will be provided with a random nick name. Choose a game room to play or you can create your own game room. Each player in the game room is given a turn in which they have to draw a picture which describes the given word. The others can see hangman type hint on top of the screen and the first one to guess the word gets ten points, second one to guess gets 7 points. There are 10 turns in each round after which the winner is declared. you can leave the game anytime.

Sneaking in learning: Apart from the fun, it introduces kids to new words and spellings and challenges them to use the hint at the top to guess the word. As players are from all over the world and of all ages, parent supervision is required although until now I haven’t seen any improper doodling or language but precaution is better. Children should be explained not to draw pictures of animated objects like animals and people which can some times increase the challenge factor in this game.

Art Generator of March

 

City Creator is a fantastic applet letting you make cities, complete with buildings, roads, people and vehicles, from scratch. Choose from medieville (a medieval city), snoland (a city covered in a blanket of snow) and blankton ( a modern city center). For every selection you would be given backgrounds, buildings, roofs, people and vehicles and roads/walkways according to your selection. Building the town is an easy matter of dragging the pieces on the canvas. Once you have finished making your town you can save your work, print it, send it to a friend as an ecard, set it as a desktop paper for your computer etc., although you will need to register in order to do the above. Registration is free but requires an email address. Or if you do not want to bother about registering etc., you can just play with the tool, and take a screenshot of your created city.

Sneaking in Learning: This tool can be great for plain fun. You can also use it when studying about medieval architecture and history, modern architecture, seasons etc. Use it as an illustration for your upcoming story or make a town setting and use it as a writing prompt. Try making math story problems based on your city. Challenge the kids to design a city which meets a particular standard etc.  This tool has a lot of potential for the creative mind.

 

Art Generator of February

 

While we are stewing here in South African summer, blogosphere is buzzing with tantalizing phrases like “snowed in”. So for those who are in southern hemisphere (and for those in northern as well) here is a super snowflaky site. Flurrious is a simple yet fun tool where you can make all sorts of snow flakes, save them and then make it snow (on screen) with your very own snowflake. A lot of fun and very easy. Choose one of the many funky tools, adjust color of the sky, brightness etc. of your flake and draw away by simply clicking and dragging. Even very young learners (or very old) can have a go. There is an option to make music with your snowflake, so make sure your children know not to use this feature. You can save your snow flake with your name and a personal message. Easy peasy!

Sneaking in Learning: Well with snowflakes learning isn’t much sneaky but a lot fun. Symmetry is the first thing that comes to mind so try these math with snowflake activities or learn some science with snowflakes.

Art Generator of January

Fancy some sand art? Sand art is not always building sand castles on a beach. It can be sand bottles or sand painting or it can be online sand painting. Thisissand is a pretty amusing and addictive online sand painter. Totally web based, you just click any where on the screen and a fist full of sand will drop on the bottom of screen. Double click and the sand will keep on falling and you can drag your mouse around to “paint” with it. Click “c” on your key board and you will get a color picker. Pretty easy to use. There is something satisfying about the sand falling and filling up the canvas of the screen. Use your imagination to create works of art, use different hues of blue to represent a rough stormy sea, use delicious shades of pink and gold for a rosy sun set, or just get some plain wild fun with it.

Sneaking in Learning: Children can practice descriptive writing by explaining how to use this site, a sort of walkthrough for younger siblings or grandma. Discuss how this sand and the way it is filling is similar to or different from real world sand. Explore what happens when the cursor is too close to the filling landscape or held too high. You can use this site as a warm up when teaching gravity. Or for once, leave all learning aside and just play with it! If your child is totally smitten with sand painting you can try doing it in real world. If you live in south Africa you can try these products as well.

Art Generator Of November

 

For artistically challenged people like me abstract art is a true life saver . I mean when your kids can’t understand that the picture you have drawn is supposed to be an embodiment of grief wearing a veil of sadness and not a rotten fig, well you can always save your dignity by saying “It is abstract art!”. So I fall in love with Bomomo the first time I used it. It is an abstract art generator which is totally web based. You you can choose from twenty different brushes. Painting is an easy matter of clicking and dragging/drawing and beware! it is quite addictive. There is no other art generator or image editor like it and you simply have to try it to understand its potential. A perfect tool to exercise your creativity without bothering about rules of drawing. You can save the artwork in their gallery, download it to your computer for your very own digital art portfolio without signing up or giving your email address. Or you can join Bomomo Art Group on Flickr.

Sneak in learning: It is a fun way to refresh your mind when it starts feeling numb with _________ (fill in the gap with your least favorite subject). Kids can take turns using the same brush and compare their results. Discuss how drawing with these brushes is different than drawing with other linear brushes. Use the circle tool to draw different kinds of circles and rings and print out as a warm up for teaching diameters and radius. Children can practice descriptive writing by explaining what each brush does and what happens when you click and drag it. Children can practice Arabic by describing a picture in Arabic or writing a poem in English about it. Make your own book jackets/ CD cases. They can use this tool to make interesting backgrounds for their blogs, a poster to hang in their room or have some plain fun using it.

Art Generator of October

Fancy a masterpiece-work-of-art-toast? With Bread Art Project you can do just that! Choose a slice of bread (Wheat, white, country white and oat meal), choose the darkness/lightness of toast, grab a brush and paint away on your bread. Not good with the brush or in a rush? Upload a photo from your computer and “toast” it on your bread. The above picture took me almost 20 seconds to make. You can save your art work, display it in the gallery etc but for that you will need to provide your email address. If you do not want to do that just grab a screen shot of your slice of bread and share it with other! You can visit the art gallery to watch others art, and there is also an education section (though nothing much in there). Random facts about nutrition are fired at you while the tool is downloading. But we do not like it for the education purpose at all!
we love it because it is so amusing to see a bread toasted with design, and we try to think of how it would feel if we eat a different designed toast everyday! We talk about what pictures we will like on our toast, which pictures would be too gross to eat! Have fun with an assortment of patterns, magic brush and text! You can even “untoast” a bread! How cool is that?
Sneak in Learning: With a text tool, learning wouldn’t be so much sneaky, but it would be fun. Try writing fun messages for the family, delivered fresh in the morning via email! Online party invitations also sound fun and why not post a message on your blog? Try writing the names of other food you enjoy with toasted bread or make an online poster (sort of) to deliver a message on feeding the poor! Or leave everything and just make a bread art gallery on your hard drive!

Art Generator of the month

I love online image editors and art generators and I am sure most children do as well. Image editors can be so much fun! We have used image editors and online painting programs to enhance learning in lots of areas like literacy, math, science and even Islamic studies. With the emergence of web2.0 so many diverge tools are available to today’s learner that not using them feels almost wasteful (at least to me!)
I have come across many interesting and out of normal image editors till now, I would post about one every month so children (and adults) have enough time to play explore it before moving on to next. I will try and include examples of how they can be used to enhance learning so you can integrate some learning in using them but above all let your children have some plain fun and let their creativity bloom while using them. Lets see for how many months I can post before running out of new tools!