Art and Activities Apps

I was at the Art Gallery of New South Wales last night as part of their fantastic Art After Hours program. It was good so see so many people attending a public gallery at night. There was a black tie event as well as a public talk by Film Commentator David Stratton on German Films of the 1930's. This was organised to compliment the current The Mad Square exhibition on Modernism in German Art 1910 - 1937.

What also blew me away was the new exhibition space for Contemporary Art. As part of the new space the gallery has produced an excellent iPad app - Contemporary Art. This has been made as an companion to the exhibition and is an excellent resource. I downloaded it straight away.

This is the beginning of what I can see as the new interactive exhibition experience. These types of apps could be developed for so many exhibitions at cultural institutions - galleries, museums, libraries. The more these institutions feel comfortable with this technology the more innovative and interactive these apps will become. I hope to find some more of these for another post.

Here are a couple of great apps for finding current Art Exhibitions: These are obviously local but it would take no time at all to find similar apps for your own region. I know these exist for most major cities around the world.


Contemporary Art - AGNSW
Get closer to the artwork than possible in the Gallery. Zoom into images to see fine details, discover stories of the artists and the art, and go behind the scenes with videos, interviews with leading artists and audio commentary. Featuring the John Kaldor Family Collection, the app includes some of the most important international artists of our time, such as Christo, Donald Judd, Anselm Kiefer, Jeff Koons, Nam June Paik, Robert Rauschenberg, Ugo Rondinone, and Bill Viola, alongside Australian artists like Rosemary Laing, Tracey Moffatt and Mike Parr.


                                   http://itunes.apple.com/au/app/contemporary-gallery-art-gallery/id459345052?mt=8



This the official 2011 Art + About Sydney iOS application - an annual celebration of public art it is being held from 23 September – 23 October 2011. This app has some great features. It uses interactive maps to display what events are happening around you. You can read up on artist and view the calendar to plan your  experience. Art + About also has Push Notification –  know about exclusive events, parties and discounted or free tickets. Text messages are sent to your iDevice informing you of events that will be taking place during the festival.

                                    
               


                                   http://itunes.apple.com/au/app/art-about-2011/id389702574?mt=8



Artwhatson
The artwhatson app is a meeting place for art lovers, artists and galleries. Their e-news delivers a weekly snapshot of what’s happening in Australian art exhibitions and galleries spaces. Whether you're new to art or have been enjoying it for years this app provides a dynamic exposure to the Australian art scene. Artwhatson connects people who like art with artists and galleries.


                                


                             http://itunes.apple.com/au/app/id422412133?mt=8&ls=1



Go Play iOS app is a school holiday calendar featuring art, culture, sport and recreational activities for kids of all ages. It brings together in one convenient location a wide range of affordable and free NSW Government school holiday activities and ideas. Search by age, type of activity or date. The Go Play app also shows you what’s on nearby. Save a schedule of your favourite activities, and share them with friends on Facebook or Twitter. The app alerts you when new activities are added.

                                     
                 




                             http://itunes.apple.com/au/app/id430798979?mt=8



Explain Everything












I love this app! I was introduced to it yesterday by a very cool librarian at the ASLA Conference (Australian School Librarian Association). This app allows you to create and record live screen action.

This would be brilliant for tutorials or how-to clips for staff or students. If you have an iPad classroom then this will be great for you. I can wait to let my kids lose with this app. They already know way more then me anyway, imagine the procedural texts they could produce with an app like this.

The possibilities of this tool are endless and I came straight home and purchased a copy - $2.99 AU. The beauty of this app is that you can create professional slick interactive presentations all on the iPad. You simply take a series of screen shots, order the images and then include any written instructions you need and then when it is all ready you simply hit the little red record button and put your voice-over onto the presentation.


Explain Everything is an easy-to-use design tool that lets you annotate, animate, and narrate explanations and presentations. You can create dynamic interactive lessons, activities, assessments, and tutorials using Explain Everything's flexible and integrated design. Use Explain Everything as an interactive whiteboard using the iPad2 video display. Explain Everything records on-screen drawing, annotation, object movement and captures audio via the iPad microphone. Import Photos, PDF, PPT, and Keynote from Dropbox, Evernote, Email, iPad photo roll and iPad2 camera. Export MP4 movie files, PNG image files, and share the .XPL project file with others for collaboration. Explain Everything has been designed for use in educational, business, and entertainment settings.




10 Free E-Book Sites for iPad

Want to get the most out of your iPad - Are you using it as an e-reader? There are multiple sites that offer free downloads of both classic and contemporary publications and the reading experience on the iPad is actually quite good. The font size, the instant access to chapters and pages and the .......all make for a positive reading experience. Coupled with this is the fact that this is about the only way to get anybody under the age of 20 to read for any length of time at all.

For younger readers and kids learning to the read the interactive experience will engender a love of interaction with the written word. This is especially true of the newer types of apps that are coming out. The same can be said for students who will be accessing more and more of their textbooks as interactive experiences. We have already seen texts where students can manipulate experiments to alter the outcome, view video and animations highlighting the key points and the individual choosing the style of content presentation that best suits their learning style.

But what is available as Free e-books or downloads and where can you access them. The following is a list of sites where you can access free e-books for your own reading experience or as a resource for your classes.


1. Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg offers over 36,000 free ebooks to download to your PC, Kindle, Android, iOS or other portable device. Choose between ePub, Kindle, HTML and simple text formats. They carry high quality ebooks: All the ebooks were previously published by bona fide publishers. They digitized and diligently proofed them with the help of thousands of volunteers and no fee or registration is required.







2. Google Books
Book Search works just like web search. Try a search on Google Books or on Google.com. When they find a book with content that contains a match for the search terms it will link to your search results. If the book is out of copyright, or the publisher has given permission, you'll be able to see a preview of the book, and in some cases the entire text. If it's in the public domain, you're free to download a PDF copy.




3. Bibliomania
Bibliomania has thousands of e-books, poems, articles, short stories and plays all of which are absolutely free. You can read the world's greatest fiction by authors such as Dickens and Joyce, Sherlock Holmes mysteries, all Shakespeare's plays, or just dip into some short stories by writers such as Mark Twain, Anton Chekov and Edgar Allan Poe. 





4. Digilibraries
Digilibraries.com is one of biggest online eBook stores, where one can find over 20'000 eBooks. Digilibraries.com was created by readers for readers; all eBooks are absolutely FREE to download without any payments, advertisements or delays. All eBooks are in high quality, so visit Digilibraries.com and try our offer.





5. ManyBooks
Browse through the most popular titles, recommendations, or recent reviewsfrom our visitors. Perhaps you'll find something interesting in the special collections. There are more than 29,000 eBooks available for Kindle, Nook, iPad and most other eReaders, and they're all free!





6. Readprint
Read Print is a free online library for students, teachers, and the classic enthusiast. The site has over 8,000 online books by 3,500 famous authors and members can create their own personal bookshelves with ratings and reviews and join reading groups that suit their interests.





7. FreeBooks
Thousands of people look for free books online everyday. This website is near the top of the search engines for "free books" so many of these people end up here. There are many different types of free books you can get online. Some sites offer free downloadable e-books, while others will ship you free books in the mail or give you credits to trade your books and textbooks with others.







8. 23,469 Classics to go
OK this one is not really FREE. Free Books is the world's favorite paid book app at $0.99. Browse our handpicked collections, download any one of our 23,469 classic books instantly, and read with our fully featured ereader. On the go? We save your place automatically. We've crafted handpicked collections to make browsing a snap, and commissioned hundreds of custom covers to bring you Cover Mode. This is the world of public domain literature like never before.
 


9. FeedBooks
Feedbooks is a digital library and cloud publishing service for both public domain and original books founded in June 2007 and based in Paris, France. The main focus of the web site is providing e-books with particularly high-quality typesetting in multiple formats, particularly EPUB, Kindle, and PDF formats.





10. ePubBooks
The focus of epubBooks is to provide access to ebooks in the industry standard EPUB ebook format, which allows these titles to be read on almost any eReader. While ebook formats like PDF and Plaint Text files can also be read on these devices, they often display in a way that isn't very pleasing to the eye, often looking quite ugly, as .TXT files contain no visual formatting and PDF content doesn't reflow. As many modern eReaders utilise small screens (iPhone, Nook, Sony Reader) this can render the words small and difficult to read, but the reflowable nature of EPUB allows the words to reorganise to suit whatever screen size you're reading on.