Check out this awesome photoshop project by one of my 7th grade students! The project was made using Pixlr (as a free Photoshop substitute) for layering and blending techniques to combine two animals into a new species. After that, we named our new species and made it a logo design!
In this lesson, 6th graders learned photoshop editing basics and were able to work from home for free using Pixlr to create their own digital self-portraits. Pixlr is a free to use photoshop equivalent that is great for school work because student can continue to access it and explore it more themselves at home! Check out some of the things Crystal said were her interest and hobbies that made her who she is!
In our David Hockney inspired photomontage project, students learned all about Photoshop basics such as resolution sizes, image sizing, canvas sizes, and layering layering layering! 8th graders who really went above in beyond in this project got creative when it came to timing and photo manipulation or were also really considerate when choosing their subject matter.
Here are a few examples from the project, to see more check out my student gallery at BillVaughnArt.com
One of my favorite free apps that I've found during my time as a teacher is iMotion. This app allows you easily create stop motion videos with manual capture and automatic capture functions. There are lots of videos already online that can help you with some of the basic features of the app, however I really think it's worth downloading and playing around with yourself to really get a feel for it!
During my time teaching I've used in creating stop-motion projects and also as a tool for documenting their process. Time-lapse videos and stop-motion are things I found all students knew of, but didn't quite understand the specifics behind how it all worked. iMotion was a fantastic way to talk about things like how animation works, how things can be slowed down or sped up and frame rates.
Like most of my favorite apps, one of the best features about is it's free so it's accessible to anyone with an apple device!
Here are two examples with a warmup project I did kicking off the year with 8th graders. For this, they worked in a group collaboration creating a symmetrical design which they would fill with zentangles and paint the negative space with gradations. To get them used to the digital integration components of the class they were to collaborate using iMotion app and Google Drive in putting together a stop-motion (or time-lapse) movie showing their process
This was a project I did my first year were students storyboarded their own stop motion movies and then took the finished videos and created music that synced up to them in their music class. Unfortunately, the files I had backed up got lost in a computer getting fried before I backed up regularly to google drive (lesson learned). Lucky for me, at least I had this video saved, even if it is without the sound!
If you try out iMotion for yourself and have any questions about it feel free to comment and I'll help you out anyway that I can!
