The Power of a Small Idea

I was checking Twitter one day, when this tweet by Anna Davies jumped out at me, with its striking red and black colour scheme and professional-looking images.

Anna Davies on Twitter

G5 deeply personal hopes&fears on display. Seeing each other from a different perspective #ishcmcib thanx 4 the inspiration @itsallaboutart

It turns out that Anna had been inspired by my Dover colleague, Nicki Hambleton, who created posters with her Middle School students, based on the work of Designer, Graphic Artist and Photographer, Barbara Kruger.

When I see an amazing idea, like the images in Anna's tweet, I always want to try it out. As I don't have a class of my own, I have to pitch the idea to my colleagues and hope that it sparks an interest.

As it happened, our school was just embarking on a PSE unit around the Power of Words. Tech Mentor Mike Bowden jumped on board and took the idea to his Grade 3 team.

Students prepared for the poster by finding a quote that resonated with them about the Power of Words. They took a photo of themselves on a plain background, ensuring to leave enough space to fit the quote.

In Keynote, students added the image, then reduced the saturation to turn it black and white. They used the limited colour palette of red, black and white for the text, experimenting with placement and rotation as needed.

This was a very rich learning task for our students. There were a lot of technical and design skills that we were able to build into an authentic context that met our curricula outcomes.

Naturally, we shared examples of our finished posters on Twitter - these examples were from Mandy Whitehouse's class.

Keri-Lee Beasley on Twitter

G3 posters: Power of Words @annadeibisu @itsallaboutart Thanks 4 the inspiration! #uwclearn #pse @debgordon123 @MickBowden @maw0305

What happened next is what I LOVE about social media. Jose O'Donovan saw our examples on Twitter and got his students to make their own - this time, posters about Kindness.

Mr O'Donovan on Twitter

Made some cool posters for Kindness week next week @HISEdTech #iPadclub Thanks @klbeasley !@itsallaboutart #his_learning

So in case you are the sort of person who worries about sharing the learning in your classroom, take the plunge! You never know the power of your small idea and the impact it may have on others. 

Impact Posters in Grade One

What's an Impact Poster you may ask? I had the exact same question! An Impact Poster uses a powerful image and a short sentence, quote, or piece of text to grab attention and highlight something of importance. 


This week the Grade one students created Impact Posters to demonstrate their learning. Some classes focused on the current unit of inquiry (communities) and other classes chose to focus on what good readers do and / or the learner profile. 


These are the steps we followed:


1) Good Searching
We discussed the importance of the words you put into a search box when looking for images. As a group we listed all the words we could think of to do with our topic. At this point we didn't judge any of the words or take any away, we decided to let the students find out which words yielded the best images.


2) Creative Commons Images
We discussed the importance of using Creative Commons images as a way of being a good digital citizen. 


3) Inappropriate Images
We can't control what people put on the internet but we can control our reactions to it. We took the time to list all the ways that we can deal with an image that makes us uncomfortable (close the program, scroll down, just ignore it, close your eyes, cover the screen with your hand, tell an adult and ask for help are just a few of the things our six year olds came up with) 


4) Appropriate Images
After finding the image that best suited the individual students thinking the image was put into a folder on a shared drive so the whole class could access the collected bank of images. Share and share alike.


5) Adding Text
The next job for the students was to pop the photo into a keynote. We used keynote as it is easy to click and drag images in and to add a text box. We wrote our statements on paper first so we could edit the spelling before we went to print.  


What did I learn?
I learned many things while working with our wonderfully creative Grade One students. First off I learned that what I think of as inappropriate and what they think of as inappropriate are two vastly different things. An image of a basement was deemed too scary to see and therefore not appropriate (and here I was worried about naked bodies!). Secondly I learned that I have to find a better way to credit the photos we use from Compfight and Flickr Advanced. For now I am going around after them adding in the credit - so not the correct thing to do! I'm thinking about trying Attribution Helper but we'll see.


Some Resources
- a blog post about Impact Posters from Keri-Lee Beasley
- a Flickr Group with great examples Great Quotes about Learning and Change

Some Examples