How to Make a Greener Classroom Without Spending a Dime

I have been teaching for only three years now, and I can already tell you that I have had some ideas and experiences about trying to make my art classroom a little bit more "green." I can tell you, that growing up, my parents were always one of the few to constantly get into recycling and care about the environment. It was their passion, (and what some may call craziness) that wanted me to instill some techniques and projects in my art classroom. From the get go with my art classroom, I wanted to do more projects from my technological background. With that angle, the students could create hands on projects and utilize the computers in our school. Using the computers would also not create a big mess for me to clean up, and it wouldn't deplete my art budget and/or supplies. Through the past three years, I have thought of a few ways to incorporate technology into my classroom which will in turn decrease the supplies that I was wasting (mainly the enormous amount of paper my classroom goes through the year) and to also teach the kids about recycling and the environment. Here are some of my lessons:

Tessellations / Math Art: An inter-disciplinary project that I have used that utilizes math concepts such as symmetry but also the higher order functioning and vocabulary words such as rotating, reflection and translations. In the past, I have had students cut out pieces of tag board into their own tessellations, now I have utilized a free program on our school's computer called Geometer's Sketchpad. It is fairly simple to use, the students can also create Dilations (one object changing in scale, I cover this concept whenever we draw a hallway) and simple animations. You can also use the sketchpad to design radial balance mandalas or kaleidoscope designs.

Movie Blogging: I have been hearing more and more about Blogging with your students and decided to put it up to the test. I take about three days to rent out my school's auditorium and I show them three movies: The Beatles' Yellow Submarine for my 8^th graders due to the impact of 1960's art; Lust for Life for my 7^th graders since we study Vincent Van Gogh; and Disney's Sleeping Beauty since they study medieval art in the 6^th grade.

I post fairly simple questions that require comparing/contrasting, analysis and a lot of the students own interpretations to eliminate the idea of "only one possible answer." The questions are posted on a separate blog, typically Blogger and they can post their comments. This way, you can get a quite kid that wants to go on and on about how they felt about the movie.

The real concept is Blogging, to get kids involved in writing and using social networking skills. You can go REALLY far with some Blogging concepts, but at it's core, it can be a great tool just to talk about and analyze some art.

Career/Artist Research: One of my standards is for students to become exposed to some art careers, and a lot of our eighth graders become absorbed into career research around this time. I have done this project in a variety of ways, but one they have enjoyed is utilizing some of the programs in Microsoft Office. Depending on our student's level of experience, they can make a power point for me that explains the art career, the skills needed, educational background, salary, etc. My more advanced students will experiment with Microsoft Publisher and they can make a poster advertisement for that job that features the same info.

These same projects can be used for my younger students to pick an artist or an art movement and create either a powerpoint or a web page on Publisher. Some of them really like the idea of designing a web page, but unfortunately there aren't many venues to display their web work on the actual internet through our school's site.

ASCII Computer Art - Another standard is to use computers to make art in the classroom and to use art history. ASCII art is a type of code used by programmers from the 50's and 60's and it turned into an art form of the 80's. The style is nearly dead now, but is used throughout the web (especially on forums). You can create art by using Notepad, and there are some really basic and rather informal websites for tutorials. Here is one that I used on creating a castle:

http://www.ascii-art.de/info/tut_jro.txt This is a fun project, it might look intimidating at first, but you and your students will be amazed and excited to see what you can create out of just a Line.

Photostory Propaganda: This is a project that I use that is inter-disciplinary between primarily ELA, but also Social Studies and a bit of Science. The program is a free one, and it is called Photostory 3 ­- you can get it on www.microsoft.com. It is basically a slide show program, a little like Powerpoint, but when you get done, you will create a movie, not a slide show.

I spend my first day talking with students about Propaganda, we talk about the types, have an ELA teacher explain it with me and we analyze some commercials to see which commercial uses primarily which type of propaganda.

Then the students spend about a day or two downloading images off of the internet to be used in their Photostory movie. Each one of my grade levels picks one concept and it is their goal to pick at least one type of propaganda to convince people to buy into their product or idea. My 8^th graders do anti-tobacco, 7^th does WWII propaganda (basically, pick a concept such as Conservation/Recycling, the students find old WWII posters of that concept and convince us to buy into it) and finally my 6^th graders do Energy Conservation / Global Warming.

I allow the students pretty much free reign on the project - some of the concepts are pretty simple when they download pictures of celebrities and type a message over a face: "So and so says don't smoke." But the kids really enjoy it.

After the pictures are ready to go, we put them in a time line, add titles, scene transitions and original music. When the students are done, they have created a movie that I give to the school librarian and she plays them over the school's tv broadcast system for the whole school to see in the morning. The best part is the kids love this program so much, they download it at home for free, and continue to make more Photostory projects at home. The final step of the program allows them to create movies that can be saved to their computer, small enough that they can embed/upload to their personal websites (like Myspace) and it can even be burned to a DVD if you pay the additional plug in price of about twenty dollars or so.

Digital Collages: This is using another free program called GIMP (which can be downloaded for free at www.gimp.org). If anyone is familiar with Photoshop, then this is the program for you. Why waste all of your time filling out grants and trying to get enough Photoshop licenses for your school, when you can just download this program for free and reap all of the benefits. Yes, GIMP is pretty much a free ware version of Photoshop - it is pretty easy to use if you are familiar with Photoshop, but not too hard to learn a new since their website has some great basic tutorials to get you started.

I use this program to eliminate the messiness of collages in my room, and it allows the students to pick whatever images that they want. It can also be used to cover basic concepts of Art, such as the Elements: Line, Shape, Color, Space - just to name a few.

So, to start my kids off, I use a basic concept of using the lasso tool to cut out one image and place it as a new layer on another so that we can distort it in the near future. I normally do the demo with pictures of teachers or students which they think is absolutely hilarious. So one time, I cut out one teacher's head and placed it on Michael Jackson's cover of Thriller - and there were massive amounts of laughter. Once I put the head down, I was able to use a lot of the other tools and filters through the program and I covered more art concepts such as balance, proportion/scale, contrast and unity.

And if you can cut out one thing - then you can do more and more and more until you get one very interesting and unique collage. Some times if the students finish early, I like them to play with another free default program Windows Movie Maker, where you can upload pictures into the timeline and add effects. You can also simulate animated movement depending on the amount of layers shown - but that is going to have to be another blog.

But what about when EVERYONE is all done?Sure you can print these out for your bulletin board - but that wastes paper. Instead, you, the teacher, can have everyone save their images as .jpg, you can upload all of their pics into a timeline on Photostory, and you will create a movie of their work. Pretty cool huh?

An Art Video Game: This one seems to be the most advanced for me thus far and I'm still willing to work out all of the bugs. But your students can design a rather basic video game FOR FREE using the program Game Maker 7, which is also for free and can be found on www.yoyogames.com.

Now, I for one am not a computer teacher, nor am I some sort of super programmer, but I have urged for collaboration of my computer teachers at school and I have read/followed the tutorials on the Yo Yo games website. The game is very simple but I was able to make it, and I knew that if I can make a basic one - then so could my students. I know that if I could at least wet their appetite of "hey guys, we are making a video game in art today," I'm sure many will flip their lids. And how will I connect it to art you ask? I'm thinking the students will research an artist or art movement and create a video game based on it so that others can learn from the knowledge that you have researched. So, I'm thinking that Vincent Van Gogh will run around throwing paint on prostitutes and the art world that thinks he is insane - only for him to find an Ear icon and get a power up to destroy them all.

But it doesn't matter what you teach, you can use a video game as a final product for all that your student has applied from their knowledge that you are showing them. The sky is the limit, I say, and all you gotta do is be patient and follow some of the tutorials for a while.

Well folks that is all I got. I have a lot of very detailed power points, most of which include the standards, the procedures and some assessment - if you are interested, perhaps I can email them to you. These are all great AND FREE programs that you can use that will incorporate technology, allows the kids to collaborate and problem solve and there is no mess or waste of supplies in your room. If you have any ideas or suggestions about other free programs out there or your own experiences with a greener and technology filled classroom - please share them with me.