VSA arts and Volkswagen Group of America, Inc., are seeking artwork from artists with disabilities, ages 16-25. This year’s event, entitled Accelerate, is the largest award program in the country for emerging artists and will give a total of $60,000 to 15 finalists at a reception on Capitol Hill in the fall of 2009. Artwork will be displayed at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C, before beginning a nationwide tour.

Theme: Starting from zero, ideas take shape, momentum builds, creativity gathers speed, and a new work of art is created. How does art propel your success and provide you freedom of expression? As an artist, what sets you in motion—and how do you fuel your imagination?

Deadline: June 19, 2009, midnight (MST)

http://www.vsarts.org/PreBuilt/showcase/gallery/exhibits/vw/current/index.html

Grand Prize: $20,000
First Award: $10,000
Second Award: $6,000
12 Awards of Excellence: $2,000

VSA arts is an international nonprofit organization founded in 1974 by Ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith. For 35 years, we have been creating a society where people with disabilities learn through, participate in, and enjoy the arts. VSA arts provides educators, parents, and artists with resources and the tools to support arts programming in schools and communities. VSA arts showcases the accomplishments of artists with disabilities and promotes increased access to the arts for people with disabilities. Each year millions of people participate in VSA arts programs through a nationwide network of affiliates and in 55 countries around the world. VSA arts is an affiliate of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

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So its Friday afternoon and your students are getting a little wild. Go with it! In fact, go right to www.buildyourwildself.com and have them create their wild selves. Here is my wildself that I made.

What a terrific fuel for creating a story. With countless options for a character and a number of good backgrounds, you really do have a neat creative tool. Thanks to Flash, there is decent two switch step scanning built-in. The click, clack sound designed in by the programmers is appreciated as well.

Nice literary connection with Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak .

So now that you have your main character, how about describing them with some of your vocabulary you are practicing on your AAC device. Wait, how about making a few more characters for your story. Too much scanning effort, try the Go Random Feature to create other characters with one press.

An additional feature is the multimodal aspects of this web application: there are many sound effects. The character I randomly generated now is surrounded by laughter samples that are actually making me laugh! The next one I just did created an ambient underwater sound.

So in closing what a great multi-level and simple tool to share with your students or other teachers. Children of all ages will enjoy this and even some teenagers might get into it as an abstraction tool. I read about this on the http://segatech.us/ site and first heard about that site from the Tech Savvy Educator blog.

So go wild!

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Have you seen a digital picture frame in a catalog, online, or in a store? This emerging technology will make a terrific book reader, photo browser, partner assisted communication tool, and electronic pencil. The good news is that they are quickly shifting to including a remote control with them. That is wonderful, because we now have a wireless device to adapt much more easily than taking the whole unit apart! Truly, there will be units with sound very shortly, but until then, what a terrific way to read your PowerPoint books you made with Flickr, your books from the Accessible Book Collection, or whatever adapted books you can export as folders of JPGs.

How do you do this? Well, you need to have the soldering equipment and the switch jacks, but have no fear. The challenge is on for one of our favorite companies to provide this to us at a reasonable cost. Until then, on the assistive technology Ning site we are going to be working the project with a goal of providing directions, recommendations on the best digital picture frame, and a list of applications for the tool.

So, game on and let’s have some fun with this as we give something cool to the learners we serve! Also, feel free to put some pressure on the usual suspects…i.e.. RJ….Ablenet…Enabling…..Enablemart….

Oh, one last thing, this relates so much to the Visual Scene work and the Visual Storytelling work. Just consider how many different people with aphasia could benefit from having a tool like this to foster sharing, expression, and information transfer. I can’t wait to share the recent success we have been experiencing in this domain! Look for it in an upcoming post!

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I really like this technique for giving children access to specific sites. The visual component is excellent whether you are doing a web based scavenger hunt, simply exploring some art creation sites, or doing a full blown webquest. Patti Rea had great input reminding that using (alt and tab) on windows and (apple and tab) on OS X you can quickly and easily move between an application, like PowerPoint or Classroom Suite, and the web. On the ICS activity exchange, my classmate Cynthia Levine and I posted an overlay that does just this. A Day’s Websites.

Download:
Art Website Launcher PDF

Art Website Launcher PowerPoint

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