New School Mural

NET-S Standards addressed:

Creativity and Innovation --By combining the digital images students take of buildings, locations, landmarks, or places inside the school into a large mural, they will be using technology to create an original work.

Communication and Collaboration -- By working in groups using the digital camera to take pictures of their school and community environment and then publishing it for their peers, they will have to communicate their ideas in a clear manner and work cooperatively to come up with a final design.

Research and Information Fluency -- The group members will have to locate spots in our town that they feel are important and then research to find information to convince the rest of the group that their image should be a part of the mural.

Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Decision Making -- Because each group will be using 6 images and each student has come up with their own list at the beginning, students will have to convince the rest of the group why their particular image should be included.

Digital Citizenship -- During the course of this project we will talk about copyright and using only those images we make or those we have the rights to use.

Technology Operations and Concepts -- Students will be learning how to operate a digital camera, how to upload and save their pictures, how to combine those images with other images, and to incorporate them into a larger image.

Day 1 - Students will be given the assignment to brainstorm all of the things that they feel make our town unique. What places, activities, or images come to mind with you think of our town? We will list those and add to them as we think of more. We will then have a lesson on how to use the digital camera and ethics of asking permission before we take someone else's picture. We will get our group assignments and read over the job descriptions for each group member.

Day 2--We will go on a walking tour of town so the students can take their own photos of the places that they feel make our town special. When we get back, each group will upload their photos and save them to the appropriate network folder.

Day 3--The students will get into their groups and find their images. Each group will have a technology person who is responsible for making sure that all images are uploaded and saved to the appropriate folder. The artistic director will guide the group when combining the images and will have final say for which design to present. The Project Spokesperson will give the explanation of why each image was put into their design and how the group decided on the placement of each image. Each person in the group will need to manipulate the images and decide on where in the design their 2 images will fit. We will use Word or PowerPoint to create the mural.

Extension: Have the students measure an actual wall of the school and create a grid for that wall and enlarge their mural to that size. We could also present the idea to the art department and those students could actually paint a mural on a wall of our school. Using podcasting ability, we could create a radio announcement telling the community about our mural and the significance of each image in our mural. We could invite the community to a special event to unveil the mural.