Consolarium

November 23rd, 2007

ICET 2007: PowerPoint and Art

Derek Robertson

Comments: 1 Comment Tags: Tags: ICET2007
 : Categories Art & Design, Conferences

Sometimes simple ideas are the best. Amid all the high tech and new ideas I saw at the conference a very simple and yet very effective idea in relation to meeting the teachers learning intentions. Nur Ilyana was one of many teachers from Singapore at the conference whose work in classrooms had been recognised by the State. They were awarded a gong in recognition of their innovative and effective practice. Nur’s presentation was really quite enchanting and is something that anyone can do.

She is an Art teacher and she talked about how difficult it is to get children who feel that they can’t draw to engage with her subject in such a way that she can extend their knowledge, appreciation of and engagement with Art. What she did was introduce the concept of Shapes and Lines to the children and showed them how they could make impressive images by combining both. There was a real oriental feel to the images that were created and they were totally engaging. the children she had been working with were Year 5 and some of their work was hugely entertaining.

Once images were created using the drawing tools in PowerPoint Nur showed the children how to use custom animation tool within and how their images could then be made to move to music. The one that really caught my eye (and it is in the accompanying photograph for this post) was of Rhianna who recorded the song ‘Unbrella’. I’m going to email Nur to see if I can get a copy of this PPT because it was so simple and yet so effectice.

As I said, sometimes the simple ideas work.