A Picture is Worth.....

Art is Life, Life is Art. Possibly my favourite idea to share with a class. When the world went digital, Life got bigger. And the potential to live out this statement grew immensely.  For years I have been using Sumo Paint with my students.  We dug out cables, hooked up cameras and loaded in photos. The lessons practically wrote themselves.  Now we walk around with mobile devices, wirelessly upload through Google Drive and sit down to endless creativity. The two images below could easily be part of an art lesson on warm colours and balance, or a geometry lesson on 2-D shapes and symmetry. The revisions and critical analysis made by students are genuine and emotional. The room often erupts in giggles and ahhhhs as they try out new effects.  They share ideas, critique each others work, and immerse themselves with little or no prompting from me. While I am partial to the photo editing tool, it has powerful paint and draw options as well. Projects can be completed in minutes or revisited endlessly.

A sunset photo I took with my phone from my mother’s balcony overlooking Waterloo Park.

Teachers that I share this tool with love that they don't have to install anything. It's an extremely versatile online image editor and painting application. You can open and save images from the hard drive or save to the cloud. I have used a few other editors but this one remains my favourite for its ease of use and maybe because it holds some great teaching moments for me.

A few ideas: Create online advertisements in Media Literacy, redo book covers in Language Arts, modify maps in Social Studies, highlight shapes in nature. And most importantly, let the students come up with ideas!