(copy) EXAMPLE: Blending Creativity and the Elements of Design

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Fourth Quarter has been full of creativity! Eighth grade students learned how to use Pixlr, Google Slides, and Canva all with a focus on the Art of Presentation and the Elements of Design: Font, Color, Movement, White Space, Proportion, Unity, Balance, and Emphasis. They designed the most amazing original, creative, and imaginative designs, posters, and works of art! This book, created in Bookcreator, provides an example of many of the projects we did with a brief summary of how we did the work. This is my personal work I created for examples, but the students' work is so much more impressive! ~ Mrs. Hagen

Working in Google Slides, we learned how to create simple images and designs by just using shapes and colors. By saving these images, we could also make them the background of a slide, without having all the image boxes get in the way of other elements such as text boxes.

Google Slides is also the application we used to create Stop Motion Animation. While creating a stop motion animation is a rather repetitive task, the results can be incredibly impressive. Students' stop motion animations were at least 20 seconds long. This may sound like a short amount of time, but it can easily take 300 to 600 slides to create an animation like this. (Click on the image below for an example of a stop motion animation.)

Of course, where would the fun be if we didn't learn how to mash up two totally different images? A peacock with the head of a deer is really kind of bizarre, but it got the point across to students that I really expected them to play with this one and have some fun...and did they EVER!

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We started in Pixlr learning how to make the background of an image transparent. Students discovered that this gave them much more control over how they can utilize and place an image in a design.

Extending those skills in Pixlr, students created designs by Layering shapes, merging those layers, and then using the Liquify feature. This was really quite fun. It was a fun way to emphasize a character by placing it in the center of the design. Of course, if we had not learned to make the background transparent, these designs would have lost their charm.

8th Grade Computer Class May 2021 Mrs. Hagen

The Elements of Design were the focus when students created posters of a quote in Canva. The extensive options available to create almost any type of design item was like walking into a candy shop...there were so many options for fonts, colors, images, and other design enhancing elements. Students created their own background. In designing this poster, they relied on all they had learned about design and presentation....the Elements of Design. Once they thought they had their final product, they needed to start making small changes, maybe add a border, rotate an image just a bit, change a color or a font type; they discovered that these small changes allowed them to see beyond their original piece of work.

Next, we explored how we could take that image with a transparent background and use it in a design or project. In this case, students created a herd or flock using a couple different images. Because the background is transparent, they were able to turn the images or flip them so that they didn't all look quite the same. By resizing some of them, the perception of distance was achieved. 

I gave students time to really explore other parts of Pixlr that we had not tried in class. By this point, they had learned the fun of testing other options and learning what else they could do with the application. The knowledge students gained in learning about Pixlr will give them more options in future assignments to create high quality and impressive presentations. These skills will also allow them to use new applications and programs with ease.