I mentioned in a previous post that I’ve been experimenting with letting kids grade student work. The whole journey will take more time to tell than I feel comfortable putting in a single blog post, so I’ve split it into parts. I’m not at a point where I’d say I have a perfect system, but …
Author Archives: theartguy
Teaching Criticism With Spam
In the near future, I’m going to be sharing some spam with my students, and not for the reason you’d think I’d do it. While teaching how to tell the difference between actual important emails and unsolicited commercial and/or malicious emails is important, that won’t be the primary goal. In addition to everything else I …
Game Design With PICO-8
The more time I spend on Mastodon, the more I like it. It reminds me very much of the pioneer days on Twitter, but without  all those issues of @ signs meaning nothing, retweets being something we had to copy/paste, not having a decent phone app… Never mind that.  Mastodon isn’t even the subject for …
Download NASA Photos, Videos, & Audio For FREE!
One of the (many) cool things about NASA is that, as a government-run organization, media created by NASA is  considered public domain. There are a few exceptions to this (mainly when NASA works with a company or university, the resulting works might be copyrighted by the other party…), but it still makes NASA a wonderful …
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Edit Video For Free With HitFilm Express
I blogged a while back about OpenShot, which is open source, cross-platform, and still not bad for some things. Are you stuck with 32bit computers? Use OpenShot. For everything else… use HitFilm Express. HitFilm Express is a robust, cross-platform, non-linear video editor capable of rendering multiple tracks of audio and video, applying chroma key, moving/cropping …
Gave In To The Dark Side (Facebook)
After a long hiatus and much thought, Â I now have a presence on Facebook again, though this time it’s a page meant as a companion to this blog. Content on both will be of a similar nature, but what I put here will be in a longer form than anywhere else. It will also be …
How Much Of Your Photo Is Your Choice?
“It’s not the camera that takes the photo, it’s the photographer.” This or something like it is said a lot by photographers. Sure, a really expensive camera can help, but give an experienced photog a point-and-click disposable film camera from a bygone era and they’ll still crank out a few shots worth remembering. So I …
Is Sharing Still Theft If It’s A Site Feature?
If we don’t teach our students about respecting the copyrights of artists, who will? Although this case is a bit of a grey area. “I attend breaking news stories across the county of Sussex as my role as a full time bonafide news-gatherer,†he wrote in a letter to the court. “In this case one …
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I Didn’t Know About The Great Social Media War
This article on Mashable reads like it was written by a petulant teen. Schools may provide students with a wealth of academic knowledge, but do they really think they have what it takes to outsmart children when it comes to social media? What’s worse is … they’re kind of right. While many educators are more …
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Free Art Books on Archive.org
I’ve loved Archive.org for a lot of reasons over the years. Many of my early podcast files are hosted there for free,  their Wayback Machine lets you see older versions of almost any website (but not my first site, as it went down before they could get to it, THANK GOODNESS!),  I have lost far …