We just returned from our Art Institute of Chicago field trip. This was the best trip EVER! The museum was calm and uncrowded. It felt peaceful, fun, interesting, the students were completely engaged and enthusiastic, lots of smiles, and great questions...and I was able to Tweet my trip (now that I have an iPhone wooohoo!) Did anyone catch my twitter feed?Click here! I also compiled the video and stills into this movie. Sorry, to the students who were not in my big or small group. I tried to capture as many kids as I could, but the ones in my group got a lot of camera time.

Learn how you can enter this contest here.

I'm so excited about the upcoming NAEA conference for art teachers in NYC.
Over 6000 art educators will converge on the city for this annual professional development conference. I'm looking forward most to see face to face the art teachers that I've been communicating with throughout the year in my personal learning networks on Twitter and Facebook. It's amazing how much we can share virtually and how it energizes the classroom.

This year I will be presenting with some amazing art teachers from across the country:

(Thursday) 3/1/2012
 12:00-12:50 Artsonia as Advocacy- Beyond the Basics
Petit Trianon, Hilton 3rd floor
Tricia Fuglestad, (Art Teacher of the Year, IL) Susan Bivona, (Art Teacher of the Year, NJ) Jim Meyers (CEO of Artsonia)
Presentation on Slideshare

(Friday) 3/2/2012
11:00-11:50 am Artsonia-Getting Started
Gramercy Suite A Hilton 2nd floor
Tricia Fuglestad, (Art Teacher of the Year, IL) Susan Bivona, (Art Teacher of the Year, NJ) Jim Meyers (CEO of Artsonia)
Link to Artsonia

(Friday) 3/2/2012
2:00-2:50 Dynamic Collaborations III
Hilton Clinton Suite 2nd floor
Samantha Melvin (NAEA Elementary Art Teacher of the Year), Theresa McGee (PBS Teachers Innovation Award Winner), Tricia Fuglestad, (Art Teacher of the Year, IL) 
Presentation online

(Friday) 3/2/2012
 4:00-5:30 Awards ceremony (western region)
 Hilton, regent Parlor 2nd floor
(Saturday) 3/3/2012

My Saturday presentation called, "Don't Jump Ship~Strive for Craftsmanship"
had a scheduling conflict and had to be cancelled. Look for my article in the conference issue of School Arts Magazine to find the content of what I would have shared.

(Saturday) 3/3/2012
 5:00-5:50  There's an App for That, iPads in the Art Room
 Hilton Concourse D lower level
 Suzanne Tiedemann, NJ (Best Teacher Blog Edublog Award Winner) & Tricia Fuglestad, IL
Presentation Website: iPads in Art 
Guest Blog Post on the Teaching Palette
***DOOR PRIZES: App Code Giveaways from the Developers of our Favorite Apps!

After over a year of experience integrating iPads into the Art Room I've teamed up with amazing art teacher, Suzanne Tiedemann of Brunswick Acres School in South Brunswick, NJ to do a presentation on the topic at the National Art Education Association Conference in NYC.
We launched a new website to hold our resources (big thanks to Suzanne for all her hard work on that) and wrote a blog post for The Teaching Palette (thanks to Theresa and Hillary for the invitation). Art teachers: come see our presentation at 5pm on Saturday, March 3rd. 
Check out our blog post here. 
Check out our iPads in Art website here.

Our 4th graders are preparing for their field trip to the Art Institute of Chicago next week. Take a look at one of the fun games we played to help students look, ask questions, and become familiar with the pieces they will see on this trip. We call it Spect-ART-acles and the best part is you get to wear some stylish glasses!

I grabbed my video camera to show you this AMAZING occurrence in the art room. When students learned how to rotoscope on the ipad this is what it looked (and sounded) like.

Years ago we tried a rotoscope project with a very motivated small group of third graders. They created an animation, divided it up into still frames, drew a contour line drawings over each frame, and deleted the photos. We used FLASH software and the interactive board to draw. The process took 3 months of 15 minute recesses. But the results are amazing!! It's hard to believe that 8 / 9 year olds made the rotoscoped video below:

UPDATE!!! 
Today a bunch of images were finished and turned in to me via email. I started sequencing them and saw the animation forming. Here is our sneak peak of what's to come! Isn't this going to be cool? If it isn's animating for you below, than use this link to view it online
at gifninja.com

Sotheby's will offer the only privately owned version of Edvard Munch's haunting work "The Scream" at an auction in New York on May 2 where it expects to fetch over $80 million, the highest pre-sale value the auctioneer has ever put on a work of art. Read the story here.
One of our Dryden 4th graders will have his version of the SCREAM shown on a 30ft LED Big Screen in NYC in early March.  I wonder if that will help up the final sales price of Munch's. Who knows, but it does give us a lot to scream about! Learn more about his screen debut here.  

All of Dryden's 4th graders made both digital versions (see this gallery on Artsonia) of the Scream on iPads and a Painted version with oil pastels, tempra, and a photo collage (see this gallery on Artsonia). View our slideshow below set to original spooky music.  

500 pieces of student art from around the country will be showcased in NYC on a 30 foot LED screen in the heart of the downtown area. This presentation was made possible by Artsonia working with the BigScreenPlaza.org project. They will be screening the artwork while 6000 art educators meet for their annual professional development conference blocks away. I'm very excited for our 4th grade Dryden Student Eli who will make his NYC debut on the Big Screen while I'll be there to see it! (His piece is image #366 which means it will show around 7pm.)
Here is what it might look like below during the show on 
Friday, March 2nd 5-8pm
Saturday, March 3rd 5-8pm

Below is my mock up of how it might appear on the 30 foot screen. They will include his artist statement along with the image as seen below.

My fifth graders came to art for their first day of Rotoscoping on their iPads. They plan to turn their little movie into an animation created by line drawings over each of the 300 or so still frames of this video (see at bottom of this post). As I watched them draw using our new styluses on the class set of iPads I captured an MC Escher moment where a hand draws a hand, but this time digitally. We hope that all 100 5th graders will each create three drawings that will all be combined into one digital animation. If it works out, we hope to enter it in Rotoball 2012.

Here is the animation video that they are planning to rotoscope. They designed it to loop over and over again so the 15 second animation could run endlessly.

Created on the iPad by first graders. Students had to go through a series of steps to locate the heart template, download it to the iPad from my website, import it as a layer into the brushes app, select the layer beneath to paint on with a resized brush, and their own color choice. Students had to learn the digital tools for trouble shooting (undo, eraser, eye dropper, and some discovered a way to use the paint bucket to quickly fill). Students were to paint the negative space of one side and the positive space of the other, create a digital tint of their color by sliding the selector closer to white, and paint the remaining spaces. Then, they emailed their artwork to me when it was complete. As a special Valentine's gift, I ran their digital artwork through the Wordfoto app which magically transformed their work into a Valentine.