For the next three days, I’m working with a group of Year 10 GCSE Art students from Wednesfield High on a digital art/animation project. The students will be using digital photographs taken in Wolverhampton City Centre to create a short film based around the concept of a journey.

Here is the sequence of activities for Day 1 of the project:

• Using CCMixter to find Creative Commons-licensed music and GarageBand to edit it and add instrumental touches
• Mapping out key moments in the music
• Practising editing together a pre-prepared sequence in iMovie - syncing key moments in the music to changes in the visuals
• Editing images in iPhoto ready for printing for creating stop-frame animations on day 2

On the 24th January 2008, the CLC is hosting a hands-on Open Day for Wolverhampton schools to see the dye sublimation printing systems distributed to UK schools by iSub Education. Dye sublimation is a new and exciting printing process that allows you to print onto a wide variety of substances, from ceramics to textiles, at low cost and in full colour.

Full details of the event and how to book a place can be found in the following PDF attachment (right-click on the link and “Save Target As”):

• iSub Open Day flyer (PDF document - 140k)

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On Monday afternoon, I participated in a session at the CLC on the ongoing transformation of the Key Stage 3 curriculum. I led a session on using technology to enhance learning and teaching. Lindsay Coleman, Secondary Headteacher Consultant, delivered a session on current eLearning initiatives in Wolverhampton. Finally, Rebecca Orszulan from Trinity Primary School shared some of the exciting work going in the school, work which has just seen the school being awarded the Runners-Up prize in the prestigious BECTA ICT Excellence Awards in the Best Whole School category.

After my session, a number of people asked if I could email details of the websites and software I had mentioned. In the best tradition of Web 2.0, I decided to publish them here instead! Where I’ve given an external web link (i.e. other than on the CLC website) I’ve written out the url in full, so that a printed version of this post will be a usable resource.

The presentation

Here is the presentation:

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Over the last three days, a group of Year 10 boys from The King’s School have been working with the CLC to learn basic and more advanced techniques in digital photography and image editing. The students took photographs around the Wednesfield area, and enhanced the images using image editing applications.

You can see some of the beautiful images captured by the students in the Session Album for the project. You can also view a slideshow of the images on Flickr.

Here are three of the images to get you started:

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During the last day or our three day project, Year 10 students from The King’s School learned more advanced image editing techniques - using the Channel Mixer to convert images into monochrome, and using and editing adjustment layers to affect how filters are applied to photographs.

The students then used iMovie on Mac OS X to combine together their best images with music and text to create a video portfolio of their images.

Here are some of the finished images:

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