iPad Apps Art eBook - Van Gogh

An Art eBook on Van Gogh was one of the first ebooks I did with a group of students. I wanted to give them the opportunity to contribute to their own learning so we threw out the old unit of work and sat down together to write a new one. We had been doing a lot of our work on Web 2 tools and so the book was based on browser based tools. I have posted about our collaborative textbooks on one of my other blogs Edtechtoolbox. People have commented on the design aspects of these books but all were made in Pages and then uploaded as a pdf. The students were very proud of their publication.

A couple of months ago I thought it would be an interesting exercise to see if I could replicate the eBook with iPad Apps as opposed to Web 2.0 tools. This is the result. I know already that there would be a few apps that I would update or change but this will always happen.

If it doesn't open on your iPad follow this link Van Gogh Apps Textbook

ArtSet - Great for building confidence in young artists

ArtSet was an impressive app that I was introduced to last week. I was presenting at a conference and one of the organisers asked if a number of the presenters could go through a workflow to illustrate how a series of apps might be able to be used to deepen student learning. The idea was the the product of one app would become the input for the next. The story of The Lion and the Mouse was suggested as an idea. Each presenter was given three minutes only. There was a cross section of both primary and secondary teachers in the group.

 I was lucky to be the first person and simply did a demonstration of drawing a lion using Artset. The next person then took the image and put it into WordFoto using words students might use to describe a lion. This could be easily developed further into a language lesson. Then they used Comic Touch to illustrate the Lion's thoughts and feelings.

The third presenter used VoiceThread to collect images and then re-order them to tell the story of the Lion and the Mouse. He even recorded a voiceover for his version of the story. This was great for students to illustrate their understanding of the concepts of the story.

The next presenter used Doodle Buddy and the My Story to have the students tell the story with their own images and then insert them into a digital book and add the text to the story. The second last presenter used Popplet to brainstorm all the areas they would need to research if they were going to investigate lions. This included habitat, environment, what they ate, how they lived and what their social structure was.  Finally, we had Puppet Pals with the presenter's image and one of the student's drawings as puppets re enacting the story of his encounter with a lion. 

https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/art-set/id469918702?mt=8