All
the
exercises open in a new window. Close the window to return to this
page. You may want to maximise the viewing area by pressing F11 on your
keyboard. Press F11 again to return to normal view. Illustrations are
necessarily small and are intended only as a prompt, not as an introduction to
the painting or other artwork. The exercises are designed to reinforce
rather than to introduce a movement or theme. Some are timed.
Nighthawks
- interactive jigsaw puzzle (you can either save this to your
computer, or click on Opento play online
Sun
in an Empty Room - interactive jigsaw puzzle
(you can either save this to your computer, or click on Open to
play online
The US teachers' site
Read-Write-Think has a series of creative writing lesson plans around the
theme of alienation, based on Hopper's paintings and the short stories of
Raymond Carver, that could also support a narrative art project:
http://www.readwritethink.org/lessons/lesson_view.asp?id=922
General
information
You can use a program called
Hot Potatoes to create your own interactive web pages
for your school intranet or your art department website. It's simple to
learn and free for education so long as you agree to share any exercises
that you make by publishing them to your website if you have one. The
software has straightforward built in tutorials to help you get started. Hot Potatoes is used
extensively for making interactive language exercises, but I believe that it
also has great potential for contextual studies in art. Interactive
exercises can be used for individual
or paired work, or as a whole class activity with an
interactive whiteboard or data projector:
- as a
plenary starter;
- for
reinforcement at the end of a lesson;
- or for independent study.
Curriculum
applications and advice Students/pupils do not need to access the program
themselves, but use a browser to work through the exercises you make. They get feedback on whether their answers are correct and a
score for each exercise. You can make a hyper-linked index like mine (see below)
for them to navigate through the exercises. Texts can be copied
and pasted from other applications such as Word so that your existing worksheets can
easily be adapted.
If you build a resource folder containing
relevant web pages, graphics and worksheets for a specific topic, you
could exploit the potential of text-manipulation software such as Hot
Potatoes to:
- set revision or extension exercises for contextual studies;
- create differentiated
support materials for pupils lacking motivation or those with poor
literacy skills;
- introduce or reinforce key words;
- explore relevant passages at word, sentence or text level.
Many different activities can be made from a single text
to consolidate learning and understanding. Graphics and sound can also be
incorporated.
Note
Remember to save all the graphics you use,
plus the Hot Potatoes files and the finished HTML pages in the
same folder for any links to operate successfully.
Make fully interactive
puzzles from your own images (BMP, JPG or TIF) with this simple-to-use
free promotional program from Tibo Software. Jigs@w Puzzle is a virtual
jigsaw puzzle with 3D appearance and smooth movements that emulate the
real thing. You can also add your own background music. As the puzzles are
.exe files they can also be used interactively with an ordinary
whiteboard.
The jigsaw puzzles are a
fun way to examine a picture in detail, while the activity also helps pupils
analyse the key compositional elements and their relation to one another.
They can also be used as scoring mechanisms for question and answer games
where a correct answer allows the team to add another piece to the puzzle
until complete (see
Self-portraits:
Vincent and Paul
in the Interactive Whiteboards section for an example of this).
