Tag: arts

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The great Brian Eno-powered STEAM PBL caper

STEAM PBL unit

Wondering how to blend project-based learning with STEAM?

Real World PBLYes, STEAM: Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math. Earlier this year we profiled The Cabot School’s amazing public exhibition of sound sculptures highlighting water conservation. They were a big hit with the Cabot community, the students who made them and, it turns out, a fair number of you guys, too: our readers.

In this episode of The 21st Century Classroom, we talk with Cabot School educator Michael Hendrix. We hear about what it takes to pull off STEAM-powered PBL and why Hendrix feels you can’t ever really teach science without art.

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8th grade arts and citizenship

A case study in Shelburne

8th grade artsArts and citizenship is for 8th graders at Shelburne Community School. This past session, they had a digital media focus, looking at photography and Photoshop and digital manipulation.

Most recently they just had a Community Celebration, where the artwork was posted around the school and families and the community came in to admire it and meet the artists. QR codes linked each piece to the artist’s reflection — reflections that took place weekly, capturing the ongoing progression of thoughts and creativity as the piece was produced.

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Thursday Links Round Up: finding primary sources for history and art

Let Google bring the world to your students

finding primary sources for history and artPrimary sources? Yes please!

As you delve into your various teaching units, why not take your students on a visual tour of an event in history? Or to the Museum of Modern Art to see Van Gogh’s Starry Night? Or to a remote village in Japan? How about a street view virtual experience of Stonehenge? Finding primary sources for history and art can be a challenge, unless you’re using Google Cultural Institute.

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5 off-beat ways to use QR codes in the classroom

By now, almost everyone’s familiar with QR codes, the distinctive-looking black-and-white graphics which, when scanned, take the scanner to a url. No? Not sounding familiar? Then how about:

5 off-beat ways to use QR codes in the classroom

If you have a phone, iPad or tablet with a QR-scanning app installed (we like Barcode Generator/Reader for Android, and Scan for iOS) open it up and center your cross-hairs on the image above.

QR codes can link to websites, event notices, coupons, blog-posts, podcasts — if it’s online, you can embed it. The QR code above links to a particularly compelling documentary video made by Montpelier’s U32 students, about school consolidation in Vermont, but that’s a story for another time.

But with QR codes becoming near-ubiquitous in our everyday environment, how can you make them new again?

Here are 5 off-beat ways to use QR codes in your classroom.

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Teaching how to code with Processing

teaching code with Processing
This past summer, we hosted another successful year of Tarrant Code Camp, where campers from all over Vermont came together to learn iOS development, website design, gaming, robotics and art.

Yes, art.

UVM Computer Science professor Robert Snapp taught campers how to code through the use of Processing, a programming language that translates code into visual and audio movement. But can students really learn to code by creating art? And what can you do with Processing after camp, anyway? We tackle those questions, along with the best way to explode a human head, in this episode of our podcast, “Code is art”.

Give it a listen.

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