While I usually only review resources and tools when I stumble across them, this summer I was contacted by a gentlemen working on publicizing the new release of ArtRage. He was curious if I would like to review version 2.5 of one of the most fanastic painting programs I’ve ever had a chance to use (read up on my original post about Art Rage). The gentlemen was even nice enough to send us a complimentary USB tablet in order to utilize ArtRage as it was intended, as a true painting simulator with stylus input rather than a mouse.

Now that the obligatory information on the free tablet and piece of software has been divulged, I can get on with the review; which is where I decided to hand things off to my wife, who just happens to be a K-8 Art teacher. I thought it would be more appropriate for her to put the software and tablet through it’s paces.

ArtRage & Adesso CyberTablet 6400 Review by Nicole Rimes

Art Rage is one of my favorite free art programs.  So, when my husband told me he had a full version to review, I was tickled pink with getting to use all the nifty tools that comes with the program.

I have used the free downloadable version on my computers at school for 4 years now.  My middle school students use it for multiple projects throughout the year.  It takes them less than 30 minutes to get comfortable with it and create some incredible art. They can use the tracing paper over photographs they took themselves to manipulate images, or use the colors that already exist on the photograph to “color” it in.  They also do some freehand work.  They are able to do all this on Macs with a one-button mouse.

First Impressions:

The first thing I noticed was that the Adesso CyberTablet 6400 was much simpler to use than the touch pad on my laptop for drawing.  It has a lot more control than a mouse would too, at least for some applications.  I still had trouble getting certain tools and other commands using only the stylus, and I switched back and forth to my touch pad for those things.  Using the stylus for the drawing was great.  There was a lot more control and I could manipulate the paint better than before. I just had to remember not to treat it like a mouse and pick it up and move it to where I wanted it on the tablet rather than sliding it along to move the curser.

I let my preschooler play with it for a while and she responded well to the tool.  Once she discovered how to move it without sliding it like the mouse (guess it runs in the family), she could draw what she liked.  She was able to write her name, mix colors, and draw herself.  She had trouble choosing colors, but I think that was more of hand-eye coordination than with ease of use. She was able to manipulate the brushes and crayons very well, although she missed some of the stamp features of other art programs.

What I Liked:

As an art teacher who uses Art Rage with her students, I was in love with the control the tablet gave me over a traditional mouse.  I could make much more refined lines than without it.  I began by just playing around with a tracing image.  What would normally have taken several hours, took maybe 30 minutes with the tablet.  I was able to paint a portrait of my daughter in about 30 minutes using the tablet tool.  I liked how I could change colors quickly, blend smoothly, and create delicate lines that simulated brush strokes. It is also sensitive enough that I could apply different pressures with the paintbrush on screen by changing pressure on the stylus.  That was a nice feature versus the mouse which didn’t have any pressure sensitivity at all.

What I Didn’t Like:

While the stencil tool is a great addition, it was not very intuitive to use.  Moving the stencil to where you want it is not as simple as just clicking and dragging.  It requires a bit of patience and a trip to the “help” feature.  Stencils can be found on page 69. The “Help” feature is wonderful and reading through the manual after having started playing with the program was a great help. Who reads the manual before you start playing anyway?

What I didn’t like was that occasionally the stylus would “jump” creating color where I didn’t want it to be.  It would randomly create an extra squiggle of color near where I was working.  This was very frustrating.  If I had been doing something more delicate, I would have spent a lot of time erasing or undoing what I was creating.

I was also disappointed with the way it didn’t react well to other applications.  I had to switch back and forth with the touch pad in order to move the window, choose new tools, or colors.  The mouse that came with the tablet was nearly useless.  It responded like the stylus in that wherever it was on the tablet, it was on the screen.  I couldn’t slide it around like a typical mouse.  The tablet was much too small to use the mouse in any useful fashion at all.  The mouse HAS to be used on the tablet and can’t be used on the table or another surface, making it obsolete as far as I’m concerned.  I would use my own mouse, or keep using the touch pad on my laptop rather than the mouse.

My middle school art students would probably enjoy the tablet for drawing applications on the computer.  It was easy enough to get used to, as long as they don’t want to get extremely detailed.  It was much more delicate than a mouse or touch pad.  I would recommend the tablet to anyone who wanted it to “play” rather than as a professional tool.

Closing Thoughts:

Art Rage lends itself well to artists of all ages, though older users will probably get more benefit from using something of this caliber.  Its many features, including stencils, metallic paint (way cool!) and tracing paper are a wonderful mix of tools to get started on your digital art project.

I absolutely love Art Rage.  There I said it.  I do.  It’s the coolest art program out there that is SIMPLE.  I can use it for doodling and playing, or I can use it for more sophisticated artwork.  The paint looks like paint.  The markers darken up if you use them in the same place just like a real marker. You can smear the paint right from a tube around the canvas and mix the colors just like you could with real paint: without the mess!

I looked through my Diigo groups earlier in the week, just to see what I would find, and this site stuck out for me. It has to be by far one of the simplest, and easiest to decipher, websites I’ve ever seen addressing whether a published work is copyrighted or falls under the public domain.

With it’s handy little red slider arrow, you can quickly ascertain whether a work that you’re studying, or would like to use in a digital media project, falls under any current copyright restrictions. That’s not to say the Digital Copyright Slider will help you determine how to go about using copyrighted materials for fair use exemptions, but rather it would serve as an excellent companion site to Tom Woodward’s website about copyright and fair use. As copyright laws have continually been amended, the most recent overall being the HUGE Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the concept of a creative work being in the “public domain” becomes increasingly foreign.

The digital slider helps clear up any confusion, and gives you a simple yes/no/maybe answer to whether a work is copyrighted, and it’s current status. Want to publish your own sequel to “1984″ similar to the unauthorized “Catcher in the Rye” sequel published this summer by Swedish author, Fredrik Colting? Sorry, you’ll have to wait until at least 2018.

What could you do with this video in your classroom?

My “off the cuff” ideas:

Language Arts: Have the students write a companion poem for the video (middle or high school)

Math: Have the students attempt to estimate the amount of surface area painted during the course of the video (extra credit)

Science: Using the position of the sun, try to determine how many days/hours the artists spent creating this work (really difficult extra credit)

Fine Arts: Create a video mural of your own, just a wee bit smaller

Yesterday I was a bit harsh on TeacherTube.  I thought that my rather grouchy commentary on the site’s service would attract some supporters of it, but it turns out all of the commenters on the post were in agreement; TeacherTube is a sub-standard tool for sharing video in an educational setting.

Which is why I thought it would be worthwhile to mention a video sharing site that I think is doing everything right. I hesitate to call it an “educational video sharing site”, because that makes it sounds SchoolTube is filled with instructional videos on how to properly multiply two digits numbers. The truth is, SchoolTube is a wonderfully creative community of student and teacher created videos that addresses almost all of the concerns I shared yesterday about the poor quality of video sharing sites designed specifically for education. What makes SchoolTube so much better than TeacherTube?

1. Commercialization

There is none! SchoolTube relies on a subscription model with light advertisements. That means advertisements aren’t being strung across the bottom of your students’ creative content, and the ads that do pop up on the site aren’t nearly as bad as the typical “FLAT BELLY RULES” adverts all over the net. If you want special priveleges, you can always sign up for a subscription, which gives you extra features.

2. Uploads

I didn’t even have a chance to take a second sip of coffee before my upload was complete. They gave me a little game to play while the video was uploading, but I had barely gotten past the instructions when I was notified that the upload was complete. No errors, I didn’t have 15 required boxes to fill in, and it was FAST!.

I even got a polite e-mail notifiying me that they had received the file and that it was being held for approval. Which is another benefit of the site. Everything is moderated, so there’s little concern about the content shown on the site. No fears though! Teachers can sign up as moderators, so they can approve their own content, which I think is a smart move on SchoolTube’s part.

3. My Homepage……has my videos on it, YAY!

I even have the ability to set a default video for my channel, so when people visit my profile they can be greeted with a video of my choosing

4. Presentation

The designers they have working on the CSS and the backend are earning their paychecks. Not only is the site extremely faster than TeacherTube, but it has a seamless look to it. The embeddable player looks just like it does on the SchoolTube page, and functions the same. I could gripe that the service still isn’t as fast as YouTube, and I noticed considerable lag in the video buffering (so much so that I paused it until it was done loading fully), but that’s a minor issue with streaming flash video. The player itself is sleek, and could almost be mistaken for your own personal video player running on your website.

5. Are There Any Better?

Sure, there are plenty of  video sharing sites out there, but with the high quality of content found on SchoolTube, a superior user interface, and good tech behind the service, I think I’ll be sticking with it for awhile now.

Just for grins, I enjoyed the following video produced by students at Kennesaw Mountain High School in Kennesaw Georgia. With a child due in 3 weeks, I had no idea I was mis-pronouncing dilate all this time!

Back in the Spring of 2007, just a few months before almost every major university had established their own channel on YouTube, TeacherTube was making the rounds of the edublogosphere. At the time, it was a Godsent gift to teachers everywhere looking for an alternative to the increasingly blocked preeminent video-sharing site. I planned entire projects around TeacherTube for the following school year, and hosted many of my student’s projects on the site. No commercials, no filtering or blocking, and best of all, it had a bright shiny apple in the logo with the word “teacher”, which magically made it 100% perfectly safe (in the eyes of many teachers and parents) from all of the detritus of fowl-mouthed YouTube commentators and inappropriate content.

Fast forward to present day, and TeacherTube has become one of the worst examples of online video-sharing, so much so that I’ve even started to explicitly advise teachers to STOP using TeacherTube to share their content.

Why do I feel this way you may ask? To be fair, I’ve broken my reasons into 5 separate thoughts, so that supporters of TeacherTube, and the entrepreneurs behind TeacherTube itself can respond in a way that best addresses the issues. That, and making lists is a lot of fun

1. Commercialization Makes Me Cry…

I understand that as a business, TeacherTube must make money (or at least earn enough VC to attract the attention of Discovery Education in hopes of a buyout). However, After several months of video hosting and streaming, putting commercial advertisements on my videos (even though they be text advertisements) is NOT cool.

If I wanted advertisements, I would have hosted at YouTube, not your site. My students don’t need to be bothered with a link advertising help with their algebra from a tutoring service. They’re getting it from me, RIGHT NOW, with the video I’ve uploaded! Also, pick a target demographic and stick with it. Advertising for online Master’s degrees on one page, while soliciting “rock hard abs” by following “just 2 rules” isn’t exactly nailing your audience is it?

Am I saying you should take down your advertisements? NO! But if you’re going to plaster them on every video you need to offer a subscription-based OPT OUT system. I’m sure there are plenty of people willing to pay 5 dollars a month to have their content be add free. It would certainly be more money than what I assume you’re getting for the advertisements being run now.

2. Fix the Uploading Crash Bug Feature

In the past 4 weeks I have been unable to successfully upload a video from home, school, and a “neutral” third party location (public library). The little java-loader tells me that everything is going fine for the majority of the upload, and then, right at the end, as I’m preparing for the “All’s well that ends well” notification, I get nothing. The web browser times out, and TeacherTube becomes inaccessible for me on whichever machine I happen to be using for at least 5 to 10 minutes. Once it does become responsive again, is it possible that my video got uploaded? Nope! I’ve had the uploading “timeout” problem since I first started using TeacherTube. It’s become more pronounced, and soul-crushing in the last few months, to the point where I don’t trust TeacherTube for getting video up in a timely fashion, let alone even successfully uploading the earth shattering discovery in my ongoing investigation as to why elementary students MUST put headphone wires in their mouths.

3. Homepages…..Specifically MY homepage…..should have…..MY videos on it, WITHOUT clicking on another link!

‘Nuff Said

4. Presentation, Presentation, Presentation

I’m not in marketing, nor advertising, so I’m sure if presentation is the word I’m looking for, but at least put a little more attention to how seamless (or unglued) the TeacherTube experience is across the web. When I visit the site itself and view movies I’m presented with a nice, visually appealing video player. Visit that same video embedded on another website and the player is completely different. No buffering notification so I can see how much of the video has loaded, no quick rewind button, not even a zen-like spinning wheel that assures me something is happening in the background. And I’m presented with yet a 3rd kind of video player when I stumbled across my “video shelf”, which I’m still not sure how I found. Pick one seamless experience, and stick with it. My vote is for the player on the site itself.

5. When So Many Others are Doing Video Sharing Better, Why Keep Going?

• Vimeo
• Revver
• Daily Motion
• Anim8

The list could go on, but the point is….if you’re not going to innovate (uploading and attaching documents does not count), then at least imitate! Too often we as educators get the second-string effort when it comes to professional tools. We don’t always get the nicest, fastest computers at school. We don’t always get the best digital video cameras to create content with. We don’t even always have the top-shelf whiteboard markers that don’t leave greasy streaks on the board, but what we do have is competent at performing our daily tasks! We ask the same online.

If even by “adopting” some more standard practices among other video sharing sites equates to a small measurable difference in performance of the site, I say go for it! If blatantly copying features of other sites turns TeacherTube into a video-sharing powerhouse, then full steam ahead!

My real point isn’t to harp on how awful the site is, but rather to point out that we as educators have choices…too many choices to allow ourselves to be shackled to a sub-par service simply because it’s branded “for teachers”. Do I have other gripes with TeacherTube? Yes. Do I appreciate the service TeacherTube has offered simply by existing? Sure…it’s served as an excellent catalyst for the educational video hosting/sharing market, now we just need someone to step up the game.

And if no one’s game, I may just have to spend an afternoon getting a phpMotion install running on my own server.