Today, in an effort to spread awareness and a better understanding of COLOURlovers, including practical ways to apply the tools and community knowledge on the site, we're highlighting the COLOURlovers group t3achers and the Forum Topic: Using COLOURLovers in the Classroom, where one member of this group, speakin_colors, shared her blog post (reposted below) with some ways she engages her students using COLOURlovers. Her ideas are shared by some like Klip who said, "I use COLOURlovers in my teaching all the time - mostly to get my (university aged new media design) students sensitised to colour combinations. Seeing how seriously many of the users of this forum take colours and colour combinations is usually a surprise to my students, and helps them to get used to the idea of spending time just playing with colour." While others suggested that it could be used for more technical training, that COLOURlovers  "could be useful for introducing them (to) RGB/HSV color schemes."

How to Use Colors & Palettes from COLOURlovers

Using Patterns in the Classroom

Students can be given patterns to colour. By teaching students the meaning of colours and how to use colour not at random but creatively, patterns can acquire powerful meaningful connotations.

Teachers can supply nameless patterns and their titles for students to match. Students can also use colour patterns as background images to produce projects of their own.

Asked if anyone had ever considered using ColourLovers in the classroom, lizcrimson wrote:

i have, and i use it as an extra credit assignment. i teach a high school graphics class. my school's filter blocks it because of the ability to write comments and notes. they consider it "entertainment". there's also the issue of some questionable subjects and words used on some palette/colour names. (like those kids never heard those words before!) anyway, its blocked. consequently, i have to make it an extra credit assignment for students who can access the internet at home or are willing to go to the public library.

i use the blog and make them write abstracts from the blog posts, including their own opinions on the articles.

(Colourlovers Group t3acherz - Conversation Topic: Using this in the classroom)

Using Palettes in the Classroom

Students can be given different titles and can create their palettes according to them having in mind the special significance of colour.

Palettes can also speak in colours, as the following post from the ColourLovers Forum shows:

It is true that a visually striking palette always pleases the human eye. The fact that colours may be named as desired, however, allows another phenomenon: the literary aspect of palettes. Colours may simply be semantically related to the palette title or may read like:

a poem

a summary based on a real or fictional story

a modified story or fairy tale

a succession of activities, one after the other

a sequence of stages progressing from 1 to 5

a definition

a classified ad

a cryptic alert message

Palettes can then be not only beautiful combinations of colours but also unique literary creations.

Students can be encouraged to produce their own literary palettes by naming their colours at will. They can also use their palettes as a pre-writing activity before drafting poems or compositions.

Colour can then be brought into the classroom to enliven classes by making them interesting unique experiences.

Find more ideas:

ColourLovers Forum - Topic: Using ColourLovers in the Classroom

Header image by Pink Sherbet Photography