I’m starting a huge East Asian Art unit with my 7th and 8th grade students. It’s written in my curriculum as Japanese Art, but since so much of Japanese Art is similar or related to Chinese and Korean Art it made more sense to combine the three a bit.
The plan is that eventually the students will create clay teacups and teapots, sumi-e ink wash paintings, and signature stamps. To start with though, I asked them to work in groups of three to create presentations comparing and contrasting the tea traditions of the three cultures.
I am not a complete idiot when it comes to technology, but the kids make me feel pretty old when they get out their computers. I putzed around with the Prezi program a bit, showed them a few basic things and then assigned them groups. Prezi is a collaborative online presentation tool so without me even suggesting it, they created GoogleDocs to share info, sent important links over GChat and then made hugely elaborate Prezis to share the information they found.
Here are a few of the finished products: