Teens Support Web-based Lesson

We celebrated Mother’s day with my mother and my wife today. Much food, cake and strawberries were had with hugs and smiles. My son, the only grandchild, was very sweet. Such a blessing. 

He and his friend from across the street helped me yesterday by posing as students demonstrating how to create a flying animation. It was great to watch how they worked together supporting the common goal that I presented to them. 

The goal was to demonstrate how to  photograph and animate four photographs to create the illusion of a fellow student flying or hovering. This would become two parts of a web-based lesson plan that I created for my Academy of Art University, Technology in Education class project this week. 

The process started last week when we created lesson plans. I had a lot of polishing to do before putting these plans on a web site but the process worked out well. I have five lessons and I created a page for each lesson. I put up an overview for each lesson, a page for each. My focus was on lesson three. For this lesson I link to two videos that I offer as inspiration. Then I created two videos. The videos I created were for demonstration purposes. 

I started these demonstration videos as powerpoint style slide shows. These became the story board and script for the what I did with my actors. I had my son and his friend read directions for this demonstration which I used as a sound track for the slide. I took pictures of the the two of them creating their photos and creating the animation. 

We gave our selves two hours. Everything went quite smoothly. It took an hour to take our pictures out of doors and another twenty  minutes inside. I spent another eight hours editing the audio and video. I’m pleased with the results given the timeline. 

I think we all had fun. I really hope they like it. I would love to work with them on future projects. 

Lesson Planning

My thoughts this past week have gone into imaging how to re-focus my efforts at the Academy of Art University as I approach my fourth semester. I find myself leaning towards developing what I’m able to do for after-school programs as oppose to aiming towards a teaching credential. Updating my stop motion animation curriculum was part of that thinking. It is also the subject of lesson planning and brainstorming I’m doing as part of Technology in Art Education this week. 

My stop motion animation class was focused on ideas about perception. It included building a zoetrope, fantascope, thaumatrope, and camera obscura along with short animation with sound effects, music and titles.  The blended learning version of the class will focus more on the aesthetics of and animation of cycles. Students will work together to create animated cycles that will be combined into a larger animated video set to music. As part of the process student will create digital photos that will be posted to a class blog along with some reflection. 

As this course is for after school program where students may not have computers at home, the online technology component of the course will all be done in class. 

Here is an outline of this curriculum as a blended learning lesson plan

Lesson 1 students will acquire and information about cycles in shape and form as a teacher presented lecture. Among the concepts presented will be the theory of thirds. Students will compose and post a digital photograph that shows an understanding of that concept. This will be the first of several blog posts, one per week for the duration of the class. At some point a sister class could share in the process. 

Lesson 2 students will acquire information about the color wheel and the use of color in the visual arts by way of a teacher presented lecture. The teacher lecture will be supplemented by a short video on the topic. Students will create a color wheel clock, a way of talking about color relationships using the hands of a clock. Students will take photos representing nine color relationships and post them on the weekly blog. 

Lesson 3 Students will acquire information about cycles in nature by way of a teacher lecture. Students will watch several time-lapse photography video representations of nature view as not otherwise possible. Students will brain storm things they would like to make visible by way of time-lapse photography. Students will photograph each other jumping in six different positions to represent themselves spinning. One of these photos for each student will be posted to the class blog. One of each student pair will describe their experience.

Students will acquire information about using simple animation software with a teacher demonstration. Students will string together their jumping photos to animate the effect of them spinning. These will be strung together so that each student is represented in one video. Music will be added. Students will brainstorm how they might use this effect and other effects. Students will post this video. Each student will write about what it felt like for them in this project and post it on the blog.

Lesson 4 students will view a set of art history morphing videos. Students will be instructed on how to create a self portrait. Students will create self portraits over two classes. These self portraits will be shared with classmates. One more class session will be used to created transition portraits, portraits that represent elements of each of a pair of students. One more class session will be used to string these self portraits together in to another class animation. Each step along the way will be posted on the class blog along with self reflection by student pairs. 

Lesson 5 students will be asked to plan an animated cycle using what they have learned and that would represent themselves in one other way. They will have the option of using various media including, clay, felt and beans. The animated cycle will require that it link to itself to be used three to six times and then it would have to link to a transition cycle. Students will think-pair-share to brainstorm ideas. The class as a whole will share their ideas for individual cycles. They will also brainstorm how the transition cycle will work. This lesson could take several classes to render. Progress on this assignment will be documented and posted weekly. The final product will string all students work together. 

The web based technology integrated lesson I will focus on will be lesson 3, animating a set of digital photos. I’m calling it, Capturing a flying student and make them spin, using time-lapse photography to see the unseen. Stay tuned.