Friday 18 January 2019

Everyone can Create - silhouettes


I recently was asked by Apple to run an everyone can create workshop during the latest “Kuala Lumpur Innovation at schools session”.The theme was student agency, but the team were also keen to have some sessions on the everyone can create books.


I had been reading and using the everyone can create photos book and have been doing some of the activities with my own kids at home and thought it would be a great opportunity to share some of the activities in the books.

We looked at techniques and strategies to empower students to take 'good' photos with iPads. We looked at variety, perspective, details, the rule of thirds and Backgrounds. Dave Caleb's book Stories through the Lens was a super resource for this. 


We then explored three of the activities from the everyone can create book - photos including telling photo stories, pictorialize your name and silhouette portraits. It was very hands on, was well received and we had some discussion on how we could use these activities in our classes as soon as we got back to school. Here is a link to the participant created padlet of ideas.


The silhouette portraits is my favourite, I loved using it with my own kids. Seeing as though I was presenting on it, I thought I better try it with some students at school. The next time I had my grade 5 cover we started exploring creating our own silhouette portraits. 

Only using the class iPad's we took profile pictures with a plain bright background, basically we were doing the thing I have been telling my IGBTV students not to do "Don't video with a bright background as you can't see the person being filmed". By doing this we got side on images that we could edit and play with (crop, turn black and white, change the contrast, explore different colours) all using the edit button in photos.

I then took this to the next level, by combing this with another activity from the book. We imported our images into Keynote and then applied Instant Alpha to completely remove all of the background.


Once we did this, we used the add shapes option in Keynote to get the students to add their favourite things to their silhouettes. 



You can search via the magnifying glass and change the colour of the shapes / images, they are also all free from copyright and allow the students to be super creative.


The kids loved personalising their images.


I showed them how to export them as new images and we had a silhouette gallery of all the students in the class and their interests.



The students had lots of fun identifying each other and seeing other peoples interests. We got some insights into the students that we weren't expecting. It was a great way for the teachers to find out about their students and we got a few pleasant surprises. 

As they played with Keynote and shapes the students started exploring different ways to add images they worked out some pretty cool stuff including how to add graded backgrounds and create multicolour and image filled shapes.

The students now have ready made silhouettes that can be used over and over again for a variety of activities. Including
  • Exit Tickets
  • End of unit reflections
  • Brainstorming sessions
  • Guessing games
  • Poetry (reverse the colours and fill the silhouette with the poem
  • Fill the head with a maths problem and solution
  • Class displays 
  • Add their artwork to the silhouette

The limit is your creativity

We can't wait to explore some of the other activities in the everyone can create books.

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