I was playing around with the ArtPad from art.com and I find it a totally engaging experience. I love watching the playback of how someone else draws or paints. This site does a really good job allowing you to control playback of your own design or a design already contained in the gallery. The site is so simple to use and it works great on the Smart Board.
This site has obvious uses in an art class but can also add a lot of engagement to an otherwise stagnant lesson.
For example, teachers or students could solve math problems and then decorate the solution for a little artistic touch.
Teachers could have a review lesson called "Painting Your Way to Success" where students get to come to the SMART Board and solve a Math problem. If they solve the problem correctly, they get to spend time decorating it and signing it as long as they don't cover the answer. Teachers could then post the links to the finished art work for students and parents to review. How excited do you think students would be if their Math art work was featured on the Internet and shared by the teacher?!! If you click on the picture above, you can see it being created in artPad. You may want to adjust the speed of the playback.
Please share your ideas for using this site in the classroom!
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Love this site! I think this would be great site to have kids use in reading. While reading about a character description, students could create a class portrait with each child adding a detail before letting the next classmate add a detail. It would also be a great canvas to have students illustrate emotions: big, sharp, red strokes for anger, smooth, flowing, blue strokes for peace...
Posted by: Jennifer Gibson | February 03, 2009 at 10:28 PM
I don't know about anyone else, but I am very limited on time in my 7th grade classroom. I have students a total of 45 minutes which is not much time for drawing and art work. I already am not able to teach all of the curriculum there is to offer in Language Arts.
It sounds like a neat program, but not very practical for my subject and grade level.
Posted by: Shannon Robinson | February 04, 2009 at 12:45 PM
I totally understand, I taught Middle School Math for a number of years.
One possibility would be to use this application in the last five minutes of a class period as a reward. If you have the application ready, this would be plenty of time to use this as a fun followup review. Not only would the last five minutes be engaging, but many of the students would be excited to view the review material outside the classroom.
Posted by: Teachers Love SMART Boards | February 04, 2009 at 01:11 PM
This is a wonderful site. I am an elementary art teacher, and I find that drawing on the SmartBoard is wonky. There is software available for art, but I'm not inclined to buy it just yet. This application is perfect for what I need at the moment.
Posted by: SnippetyGibbet | February 04, 2009 at 05:30 PM