Hoeben’s Blog

Our school currently has links with six schools in Delhi through the British Council’s UKIERI programme. Today, I am running a workshop/conference with a delegation of senior staff from our cluster schools in India and using this sideshow to evaluate our progress so far:

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As part of this project, we asked students to create Q&A podcasts. Initially, we asked students from all schools in India and London to exchange questions as audio files and then edit them in audacity or GarageBand to create a podcast. Here is an example of five Q&As:

The film was made by Callum Robertson, a Year 13 student studying A2 Photography, for his exam title ‘Transition’ and captures a mundane journey through a number of fixed perspectives. It was made with the new iMovie, however, there were a number of frustrations as he was unable to slow down footage and limited sound editing, which seems pretty basic for an AV editing application. It is a shame since many schools like use iMovie since it is simple to operate, whereas Final Cut Pro, Avid, etc.. are too complicated to teach in such a short, crowded curriculum. Anyone know of any good alternatives?

Strobe 4, originally uploaded by Fortismere Art & Photography Department.

This project worked really well – one of our Year 13 students, Patrick Raimondi-Taylor, recently brought in a strobe and took photos for his photography exam project ‘transition’ using a long exposure and low ISO. He’s got some great results – visit his Flickr site and leave a comment.

Next year, I hope to make creating a digital portfolio a prerequisite of the A-Level course so that students are use to sharing and managing assets online.

Animations provide an excellent way of bringing drawings alive. This animation was done by a Year 13 student studying Applied Art & Design.

In order to get more children enjoying drawing, it might be best to move away from the 19th Century concept of Still Life drawing and painting and towards more applied method of drawing such as using drawing instead of images to make an animation.

I used to work with the Campaign for Drawing, which champions the uses and relevance of drawing. They set up the Big Draw events, which have now been adopted across the UK and Eileen Adams, who runs the Education programme, has produced some interesting literature.

Every year, I get a few sixth form students to help photograph the year 11 students during their National Record of Achievement (NRA) evening. We set up a white backdrop with studio lighting and take portraits. In our school, the students don’t have a uniform so they tend to go a bit overboard when dressing up for such events… Here is an animoto video including some of the images:

One of the most stressful parts to organising such an event is giving students access to photographs and then being asked to print them out. So, this year we decided to use Photo Box as a platform for sharing images. In Photo Box, you can specify a password code so that it is not public, but still easily accessed as you don’t need an account to view images. Anyone can then order prints, which are printed and dispatched by Photo Box.

There are other services where you can specify a fee on top of the printing costs so it is possible to make a profit. As a department, this might be an extra way of raising funds to buy capital items or even allow students to profit from their work.

I can see slideshare being a great way of getting students to prepare presentations in advance and cutting out the technical nightmare of them arriving to lessons with a corrupt or incompatible file. Here is an example of a presentation I created for my A-Level Photography students:

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If you haven’t yet used the PicLens Plug-In for Firefox, then you are missing out on an excellent way to present and interact with images. I used it yesterday at our GCSE Art & Photography exhibition by projecting images through a SMART interactive whiteboard and viewed a Flickr set. Visitors were able to scroll and interact with the images using an impressive 3D interface. Well worth downloading and it’s free.

In terms of Photography, I would use this in conjunction with Flickr and get students to tag their work, which could then be searched in Flickr and presented using PicLens. Last year I did a project with a group of GCSE Photography students and invited Barry Lewis, a professional photographer, to come and run a 2-day workshop getting students to respond to his set of photos called ‘Visual Noise’.

We visited a local allotment and the students took hundreds of photos focusing on colour, texture, structure etc… They were then asked to make a selection of 10 favourite images and, as a group, we went through and collectively decided on the best 3 from each student ending up with a refined collection. This process took place by copying images from a central server and then viewing them using iView Media Pro. Below is a Flick badge of that work:

In retrospect, I would now get students to tag all their photos with a special code i.e ‘GCSEVISUALNOISE’ and view it in PicLens and make a selection from there or just use it to discuss images. It is a great way to quickly identify and contrast images. I am waiting for them to create a pasteboard where you can drag images and create quick collections.

This is a fun program for the Mac, allowing you to integrate movies, images and sound files to create a multimedia presentation. There are lots of templates – I would suggest choosing a template that doesn’t overemphasize the background graphics. I like the fact that you can export as a large movie file.

Apart from being a special way of presenting students’ work, this programme is essentially a means of making small documentaries, lending itself to post-production work for students. As an exercise, you could upload a series of raw files and movies onto a server or VLE, which students could access to edit and make a presentation as part of their coursework using Pulp Motion.

Below, I have posted a example of a presentation of work produced by Year 7 students in response to Yinka Sonibare’s ‘Alien Nation’ art works:

In the past few years, a few of our students have expressed a strong interest in making animations. Recently, Louis Marsh, a Year 13 student, produced this excellent animation called ‘Evolution’ from his A2 Art Unit 4 Exam project ‘Transition’:

It would be good to have a platform for sharing such work beyond the school network. Blip TV seems to be the best platform outside YouTube, which allows you to create a TV station. Students can write comments and view it easily. there is an upcoming event called ‘Shine‘ in association with Creative Partnerships and Channel 4, amongst others.

Our school currently has an international link with various schools in India via the British Council’s UKIERI programme. As a pilot project, we are working on a collaborative podcast activity where students in both countries send each other audio MP3 questions. Then, using Animoto, create an audio visual podcast using Audacity to edit sound files and upload as MP3s along with found or taken images.

Here is an example of a collaborative podcast using Animoto: