good at right away. Developing enough skill with the tool to use it effectively took some practice. Katherine and Matt foster student choice in their classroom and the tablets were always one of those choices students could use to complete their projects. Students who were not comfortable with the tool often opted to either use the computer trackpad or hand draw the images for their class projects.
The software package, which was one of Matt and Katherine’s reasons for selecting this particular tool, turned out to be less valuable than they had hoped. The tablet came with a single license for each piece of software. With so few licenses, installing it onto all 125 of their students’ laptops was not possible. They had two desktops in their classroom, where they installed the software, but sharing only two stations among an entire class was not practical. In addition, the Adobe and the Corel products turned out to be older or “lite” versions, lacking some of the features they had hoped to use. Fortunately, a number of good pieces of software were available for free, such as Google Sketchup (sketchup.
google.com), Blender (
www.blender.org), and SumoPaint (www.
sumopaint.com), and the students were able to use these for their projects.
There is an old saying, “you don’t know what you don’t know,” and so it was for the first year of GeoArt. Many of the projects that Matt and Katherine had carefully designed before the start of the year needed to be tweaked or redesigned. In some of the cases where they had planned to use the tablets, it worked out to be impractical to have all the students use them, and in some cases it wasn’t practical to use them at all. In addition to the exploratory time that the students spent getting familiar with the tablets, there were two major projects where students incorporated the use of the tablets.
The first of these was originally planned to be a design project for an addition to the school, which was still under renovation. When the addition idea was abandoned by the district in favor of some less costly options, the project was revamped to be the interior and exterior of a house specifically designed for the incoming work force from Hollywood taking advantage of Michigan’s tax breaks for the film industry. The interior was created using Google
Sketchup, and students were able to use the tablets and pens to control the software. Those who had gained some skill with the pens found they were able to better control the draw and paint program than with the trackpad alone. Students were given several options for creating their exterior models. Some chose to build 3D models out of materials of their choice. Some chose to draw the exteriors by hand, and some chose to use the tablets with an online draw and paint program called SumoPaint. Many found that the tablets gave them greater control of the draw and paint tools.
In the Future Self Digital Collage project, all of the students were able to use the tablets by splitting the class into two smaller groups. After a school-wide exploration of the ideas of utopia and dystopia, students were asked to design digital collages depicting their ideas of what would be necessary for their own personal utopia. Starting with a copyright free image as their background, students used the tablets to add their own image to the collage, manipulating the graphics with the pens and adding text as the final layer. Although some students struggled with the tool, many had become comfortable enough with it to use it effectively in this project.
Despite the challenges Matt and Katherine experienced in using the tablets in their GeoArt class, they like the tools, plan to use them again this year, and have plans to incorporate them in some new ways. In addition to the projects where the students used the tablets last year, they are also planning to use the tablets and pens with Jing (
www.techsmith.com/Jing) or a similar screen capture software to create math tutorials. Students will use the tablets to write out the problem, showing their work, and explain what they are doing as they go along. They also plan to give students more opportunities to practice using the tablets and pens, and to give more options for students to choose to use the tool for completing projects or in giving presentations.
Gretchen Reist is the Director of Technology for the Ypsilanti Public Schools. She may be reached at
reist@ypsd.org. Matt Perry and Katherine Fisk teach the GeoArt class at Ypsilanti New Tech @ Ardis. They may be reached at
perry3@ypsd.org and
kfisk8@ypsd.org.
MACULJOURNAL
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SPRING/SUMMER 2012
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