Artkive is a free app for iDevices that is an answer to the prayers of parents everywhere – “Someone please tell me what to do with all of the pieces of art that my child brings home from school!” Jedd Gold, the creator of Artkive, developed an app that not only allows you to create a digitized gallery of your child’s work, but to create “Share Circles”, allowing you to send immediate notice to relatives and friends any time you would like them to take note of a new piece that has been added. Once they receive the link, they can view the art, and download it if they wish. Soon, Artkive will be giving you the option to order books and other items customized with the art.
This is great for parents of highly productive aspiring artists, but how can this be helpful in the school setting? I e-mailed Jedd, and this is a portion of what he had to say,
“100% this is a very simple and fantastic classroom tool:
- Each child you add to the app is like a “folder.” As a teacher you can create an account and then add each student as an individual child (i.e. a folder of each child). You can walk around, snap a photo of a child’s artwork, writing, or other work, then choose from the dropdown which child created it. The app will automatically tag the grade and date it was created and you can add a title if you’d like. Then hit artkive and that image is now chronologically stored. From your artkive, you can see all the kids’s work together, or sort by child and see just their work.
- You can add each parent to the share circle and with the press of a button, share a specific piece of work, or an entire artkive, with the child’s parents.
- At the end of the year, you can give parents the option to purchase a book of their child’s entire year of art/school work.
- You could also use the app to just take pictures of the kids. You could add a child and instead of a name, call it “Terri’s Kindergarten Class”. Then each time you take a picture of the kids playing or whatever, you could put it into that “folder” and you’d have a collection of class images that you could share or print.”
Reblogged this on EDUTech.