Adventures in Art: Online Activites and Projects for Kids

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (USA) has a great website that is full of resources for the classroom.

Two main education areas are:

• NGA Kids - this resources is full of interactive flash games, programs and projects for students of all ages to engage with.
  
• NGA Classroom: for Teachers and Students - lessons and resources can be accessed by a curriculum, topic, or artist.

Online Tours are available for exploration by artist, artworks or themes. There is also a large collection of videos and podcasts that can be downloaded about various topics related to art, artists and artworks.

Creative and engaging "Small World" developed with Adobe Flex application

One of our senior engineers has a colleague who is part of the Outsmart team, a company here in Auckland, New Zealand that develops unique Rich Internet Applications (RIA). He showed me a new web based 3D virtual world called SmallWorlds that Outsmart has developed.

Once I got my beta invite (and some time in the early morning to have a play) I was able to quickly build my avatar, shop to buy some furniture for my new home, play games, watch YouTube videos on my flat screen or sit and chill and admire my personally designed art work.

If you are interested in giving SmallWorlds a whirl...email me at brenda.frisk@nextspace.co.nz (it is a closed beta) and I will email you a beta invite (put in your subject header: "smallworlds beta invite".)

I was able to catch up with Darren Green, Technical Director for Outsmart, and ask him a few questions:

1. How did your concept evolve for Smallworlds?
   
   SmallWorlds has evolved from several product ideas we have been considering over the past 18 months. We (Outsmart - the company behind SmallWorlds) have been designing and building products for numerous Web 2.0 start-ups, and through this process have been in an ideal position to get a feel for when the convergence points were forming for web applications and services.
   
   SmallWorlds evolved from several products we were considering to build:
   • collaboration
   • sharing and realtime communications applications (groupware)
   • game building and sharing platforms
   • and several ideas around social networking applications.
     
     
   While SmallWorlds is in essence a casual virtual world, it is in a broader sense a new way of sharing and consuming web content, media and other forms of digital entertainment. Our vision for SmallWorlds is for it to become a place for like-minded people to socialize, share, play and even create on the web.
   
   
2. Who is the target market for Smallworlds?
   
   Being a convergence product, SmallWorlds has several target markets that we hope to cover. Our primary demographic would have to be users 15-30 years of age who like socializing on the net, but we intend to cover a broader range than this by including casual games and group collaboration capabilities.
   
   
3. What will a user find when they come into Smallworlds?
   
   An easy to use, yet powerful avatar builder. A room builder where you can create your own perfect socializing and entertainment space. We have virtual shops full of items and widgets (such as Graffiti Canvases and YouTube TVs), and there are plenty of spaces to explore. We are in the early stages of a private beta presently so the options currently available are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what is yet to come.
   
   
4. Adobe®Flex™Builder™ 2 is now free for education institutions. Do you foresee that skills in this area is something students in senior/high school could/should focus on?
   
   We see Flex as being one of the most advanced and powerful application development platforms available today. Combine that with the ubiquity of the Adobe Flash player (the virtual machine that Flex applications run in), and the explosive nature of the Web 2.0 phenomenon, and you will see (as we do) that Flex Development will become one of the most highly demand skillsets for graduates in the coming years.
   
   
5. What other skills could you suggest to students if they were looking to get into this field?
   
   Modern applications are bringing together both technical and graphic/visual design skills. Having some exposure to tools like Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash is definitely an advantage.

Picture Gallery

Here is my avatar just hanging out listening to music in the public chat lounge.





Shopping for furniture (you start with 1500 tokens) for my new "digs."





Starting to setup my virtual home with the some of the furniture that was purchased from the Modern Living furniture shop.





School Chat....
Navigation and the user interface is very easy to use and get around in. I see a lot of education applications where SmallWorlds could apply....I look forward to further discussions with the developers to see how this can be implemented.

Have Fun!

Navigating the waters to find out information on various USA universities can be tricky

College Navigator is a great website that brings together all of the USA universities and colleges to help people choose a school that they may want to go to.

Picking up on the "personalized" aspect we usually see in social networking sites, this website allows the users to personalize their search. With things such as building a list of favorites for side-by-side comparisons; interactive maps that will pinpoint school locations; exporting your results onto a spreadsheet; saving your sessions to go back to for further investigation.

The site is sponsored by National Center for Education Statistics offers over information on approximately 7,000 postsecondary institutions in the USA. There is a wide range of resources available on this website to help a student narrow down a choice for a postsecondary institution from finances to housing.

Splashup is a free (beta) "web-based" graphic editing program. You don't need to sign-up to start using the program right away. You can either load an image from your computer or from a URL, Picasa, flikr, facebook, splashup or an image captured from a webcam and edited directly in Splashup.

Splashup has a photo sharing service built into it. With a variety of tools, like many of well known photo editing software applications, such as filters, editing multiple images, layers and blend modes, layer effects, brushes, etc...

I did have some difficulty with some of my image manipulation upon trial. When I tried to erase part of an image it kept moving and replicating itself. I also tried to manipulate layer names and it kept defaulting back to the standard name.

Over all, for a free beta quick and easy image editing program accessible on any computer - anywhere - it has potential.

Email is so old school.....the young embrace other forms of communication

Okay raise your hands.....how many of you are just getting the hang of email.

Too late!

Let's move on now.....

An interesting article by Digital Chosunilbo .... "New Forms of Online Communication Spell End of Email Era in Korea" writes that due to "replacement forms of communication," the era of email is coming to an end!

Korea is one of the IT power houses in the world. Two quotes from this article said it all, "I use email when I send messages to elders" and "I use email only for receiving cellphone and credit card invoices." Spoken from two young Koreans in their early twenties.

"Internet messengers, mini-homepages (dubbed "one-man media"), and SMS" in Korea have become the communication tools of choice.

Guess what....this article was written in 2004....feeling really behind the times now?

Today...."South Korea is one of the world's most wired nations, with broadband connections in about 70% of homes. Blogging is a common form of communication." (source: globaltechforum)

One third of South Korean teenagers average 100 text messages per day.....how many of your text messages actually get spelled and sent correctly to the recipient? How many words per minute can you text without looking at the keypad?

School Chat....
So what does this mean for education institutions? Well it means if the only means for your students to communicate with "you" as teacher or with each other while at school is email.....old school.....old technology.

You know the drill, as soon as those kids leave the doors of the school they are back into their multi-sensory, multi-communicative world.

Hmmmm - kind of makes you want to be a kid again, doesn't it?