Today, I began the annual Renaissance Photoshop Project with Yoshiko Maruiwa, my favorite 6th grade Art teacher at The School at Columbia University. As part of the 6th grade integrated study of Florence and the Renaissance in English, Social Studies, Science, Art, Music, and Wellness, Yoshiko and I team-teach this Photoshop unit where students locate a Renaissance painting and layer themselves into it as either the main character or an additional character.

Here are the directions for our 3-day unit:

1. We talk about media literacy. Today, one girl said it was like "reading pictures." I liked that a lot. As a group, we defined media as the plural of medium and gave examples of both:

Media = how to convey or communicate information or mass communication, the news are described as "the media" and can share information using a variety of means (television, radio, internet, etc...)

Medium = how something is communicated or expressed: a drawing, painting, watercolor, television, email, texting, movies, music, commercial, song, newspaper, internet, magazine

2. We watch the Evolution video from Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty.

3. We talk about how easy it is to use technology to manipulate an image and why. (Marketing!)

4. We do a brief tour of the Google Art Project. (http://googleartproject.com)

With a team of Googlers working across many product areas we are able to harness the best of Google to power the Art Project experience. Few people will ever be lucky enough to be able to visit every museum or see every work of art they’re interested in but now many more can enjoy over 30 000 works of art from sculpture to architecture and drawings and explore over 150 collections from 40 countries, all in one place.

5. We talk about Artstor and it's subscription service which Columbia University pays for. We look at the Permitted and Prohibited uses. I remind them that it is super important to read the terms and conditions of a website so that they avoid doing anything illegal or unethical (whether intentionally or accidentally). Everything they do online public, permanent, and traceable. (http://artstor.org)

The ARTstor Digital Library is a nonprofit resource that provides more than one million digital images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and sciences with an accessible suite of software tools for teaching and research. Our community-built collections comprise contributions from outstanding international museums, photographers, libraries, scholars, photo archives, and artists and artists' estates.

6. Students choose a Renaissance painting from Artstor that they will manipulate. The directions for the project are here.

7. We talk about ownership of Art. Who owns the Mona Lisa? Yoshiko made a simple slideshow about variations of the Mona Lisa here. We discuss copyright and fair use and discuss Shepard Fairey's Obama Hope painting. My lesson plan is here.

The annual 7th grade Great Mathematicians project is underway. Dr. Sabrina Goldberg's students are currently fleshing out faux profiles for their assigned mathematician on The Social Network, our in-house social network powered by Elgg. This year, Don Buckley and I are asking kids to distill their mathematician into a graphic to be used on their digital profiles and on their physical poster.

Examples:
DeCartes - Cartesian Plane
Newton - gravity, apple
Tesla - electric current, lightbulb, or lightning bolt
Erno Rubik - Rubik's cube

 

After the incredible success of the Tools at Schools design collaboration with aruliden and Bernhardt Design, Don Buckley (@donbuckley) was inspired to have faculty at The School apply the design thinking model for our Year of Innovation.

These pop-up houses, on display throughout the school for a few weeks, are the result of many months spent researching discussing, researching, ideating, and prototyping. Inside are snapshots and notes from each group and an iPad3 (on an iPevo Perch with headphones) running a video where students, faculty, and parents talk about each concept (Homework, Discipline, Recess, Lunch, Grading). Kudos to Hil Szanto (@hilszanto) and Cristina Martinez (@finlaycm) for the videography and editing!