I have a 14 month old little guy who loves a good old fashioned messy art session.  This was the inspiration for today's Fresh Look Fridays blog post.  

Check out the following 2 sites for fun interactive art activities for the younger generation.  These would be great for use in a preschool, kindergarten or primary classroom, or anyone else working with the cute, snot-nosed little munchkins that run around with more energy than I can ever imagine!

ArtPad is your basic run of the mill online canvas.  See some of the premade gallery paintings, make modifications to those, or channel your inner Picasso and create your own masterpiece from scratch.  While I would never advocate against the use of messy paint supplies, sometimes these little activities on the SMART Board are a fun way to fill some extra time for kids who are already done a project, or a way to have one person demonstrate a technique to others.  Check out my amazing artistic abilities:

I know. Super jealous, right?

The next feature for this week is the Crayola Lights, Camera, Colour! App.  It's designed for use on both the iPhone and iPad - perfect if you happen to be in a school with a class set of iPads floating around.  This app essentially lets you be artistic with a picture that you have already taken.  You choose the picture on your device, and voila! This app will magically drain it of all colour, turning it into a virtual colouring page!

So cool.

Your students can then print them out and colour them the old fashioned way, or stay on the app itself and colour, draw and add stickers til their hearts' content.

Time to roll up your virtual sleeves, and brush up on your art skills.  Have a good weekend.

Vanessa

A little tooting our own horn here today.  Just letting you all know about a fantastic event we're hosting in Vancouver on October 23rd, 2012 -- our Digital Signage Symposium.

I had the privilege of attending one of these in Calgary a few years ago, and it was well worth it! We've got some excellent guest speakers whom will share their experiences with the implementation of digital signage and share best practices for your own setup.

Check out this invitational video below:

Please RSVP to rsvp@sharpsav.com if you're interested!

Vanessa

Unless you were living under a rock during summer vacation (and I wouldn't blame you if you really did hole up for 2 months with only your iPod, some non-education related reading material and a whole lotta wine), you are most likely aware that NASA managed to land the rover Curiousity on Mars in early August.

Since I love current events, interactive websites and cross-curricular integration, I couldn't possibly pass up this week's Fresh Look Fridays' websites.  That's right folks -- not just one, but TWO websites for the first Fresh Look Fridays post of the new school year.  You're welcome. (and a big thanks to Val for showing me one of these websites increasing my blog post focus from 1 to 2 this week!)

Feast your eyes on some cool science exploration via the magic of the interwebs:

Photo JPL.com is a site devoted to panoramic pictures, and was the first one to create the 360 view of Mars.

360cities.net is another excellent website housing panoramic images.  Check out their version of the view from Curiosity:

So. Freaking. Cool.

What a great springboard for conversation in your classroom.  Bonus points if you set it up on the SMART Board for students to explore.

Vanessa

As many of our loyal readers may have noticed, our blog has been a bit sparse lately.  This is in part due to the fact that summer is a slower time in the education world, but mostly it's because I apparently fell victim to an I D ten T error...ID10T, get it? (shout out to Joey for that little nugget).

Yes, it's true.  After so many discussions on Twitter and blog posts on here regarding the best way to remember your passwords, I managed to FAIL at remembering my username for this website.  Rather than being rational and immediately emailing our ICT department for support, I decided to do what any Gen Y-er would do when facing computer issues...I repeatedly tried every combo of my usernames and passwords that I normally use on a variety of websites, attempting 132 logins in the course of, oh, 2 minutes.

Whoops.

I guess this website has a bit of built in hacker-prevention, as my attempts eventually got my IP address blacklisted.  And thus began the 3 week saga of trying to get Joomla to unblacklist me.  Our tech support has been amazingly patient and helped me work through this issue to the point where I was able to successfully log in last night and post my first blog post in nearly 3 1/2 weeks.  Yay!

Stay tuned.  This is just the beginning of many more posts to come, providing I can continue to remember my login info for the time being.

Vanessa

Today marks the first official day of school (with kids in the classroom) for many of my teacher friends, former colleagues, and workshop attendees.  It also marks the beginning of my THIRD school year not being in the classroom -- a decision I'm still happy with, but occassionally wistful for the good ol' days.  Then I remember the 2 am essay marking sessions, eight gazillion commitee meetings and the endless amount of outside-the-classroom-walls paperwork I had to complete, and I'm suddenly jolted back to reality, savouring my years in the classroom as fond memories but not regretting my decision to leave.  I bow down to all of my friends, colleagues and tweeps whom are still slugging it out day to day and hope that this school year is your best one yet!!

I know many people expected me to impart some stunning technology wisdom to send them off on yet another school year, but I decided after the first day of classes, most of you just want a laugh (and the depth of my wisdom may be debatable...)

So here you go.  Some of my favourite ecards discussing the truth about Back to School:

Happy 2012-2013 school year, everyone!

Vanessa