Now that my 2nd grade students finished their amazing George Washington Portraits (view them here), we checked out the iPads for the day and put the images on a dollar bill using the Festisite money effect. Now that you can upload images on iPads to most websites and add images into emails we went ahead and tried all these steps on iPads... and it worked!
I had the class images in my dropbox with a link to the folder. Students just followed the steps below and clicked on my links to go where they needed. What was really easy was the link for my email address which you can find as a choice for a link in Weebly. That link auto-filled my email address so all the students had to do was add the photo and their names in the subject line.

Put your portrait on the dollar bill
1. Find your picture here. 
2. Save it to your camera roll
3. Click on this link to put it on the dollar bill.
4. Save it to the camera roll.
5. Send me your dollar bill image here.

See the whole gallery here.

I'm looking for a way to create a class photo collage project where we can add our custom pieces, share them, rotate, resize, overlay, change opacity, and erase parts.
I think MIXEL app used to do this until they changed their format. Muse app is close to what I want except for the customization.
I played with these ideas from my own sources of images in Sketchbook X (and Brushes app). It works, but there may already be an app that makes this easier. Any ideas?

Here is how I started. I imported Edward Hopper's Nighthawks into the Brushes app and color matched and texture matched until I could rub away two of the characters. 
Here is my finished file.
Then I pulled in pngs from my collection on layers that I could transform.

Do you see that shelf of binders? (I know, I love binders but that's a different story). It FELL yesterday. It completely collapsed and spilled out binders all over the counter.
This happened yesterday and not today with all our clay mask projects lined up to dry.(WHEW!!!) 

We are a lucky bunch of artists here at Dryden. Thank you Mr. Bob for putting our shelf  back up this morning so everything could find a place again.

We poured so much artistry into our clay masks. They are irreplaceable. Take a look at some of the 5th graders at work below.

When we were all cleaned up we tried making a collaborative clay mask on the ipad.
I quickly popped it under our iPevo camera and started up the free app, 123D Sculpt.
I just learned about it over the weekend and had made a demo video to show students some of the things it can do.

View my tutorial video here or below.

To the left is a student sculpting digitally as the class watches on the big screen. After she makes her mark, she will call up another student to make theirs.
I caught some of this on camera. Watch it below.

I created a page on my website dedicated to helping teachers get started with creating on iPads. It has links to resources, files, videos, tutorials, and art galleries to help you through the process. I added some handouts today with a bit more detail to help things along. Download the pdf here.

I recommend starting with this icebreaker activity to help you explore the painting tools, get a feel for the stylus, and trouble shoot Brushes app until it is doing what you want it to do.

Click on the image to enlarge.

This activity uses the Brushes app. This is a nice project to help create a collaborative piece of art while learning digital tools and refreshing your figure drawing skills. You will need my template to get started. 
Click on the image to enlarge.

You will need a couple of my files and the Brushes app again for this technique. I also have a video that will help you see what this looks like in the classroom.
This technique can be used for any sketching activity when students need to look closely.
Click on the image to enlarge.

This graphic design technique is so easy that you'll start to wonder if anyone would pull out the laptops and try to layer in photoshop with elementary students ever again.View the video of students working. Grab hat. Grab a sample of healthy choices. 
Click on the image to enlarge.

This project was a grand slam with my fifth graders. This  technique is spelled out in this post. I put together a sample set of images to practice with taken from a 4 second video with at 12 fps rate. So give it a try.

Click on the image to enlarge.

My third graders LOVED learning to create an animation using a flip book technique with onion skinning which sounds complicated, but trust me, you'll catch on really quick. View my tutorial. See my students at work

Click on the image to enlarge.

When Pigasso met Mootisse by Nina Laden is a great book for elementary art students. It is full of colorful pig and moose versions of Pablo Picasso's and Henri Matisse's artwork, playful word puns, and a bit of art history.

->Buy the book here
->Play this youtube version
->Have an actor read it to your students here

I put together an active learning lesson to accompany this story using an ipad app called, Compare a Twist. This app allows you to make custom lessons on any concept that helps student literally sort out their facts. I demonstrate how to download the lesson and use it in the quick video below. The lessons asks students to sort images by artist.

Graphic Organizers
Compare-a-Twist allows the teacher to set up a compare and/or contrast review game on any topic. Students drag the text or image to the correct side of the screen. Animations give immediate feedback to learners. Teachers can save their games and share them via google docs. Ideas: Sort primary/secondary colors Sort warm/cool colors. Sort images by genre.

Collaborative Art
Make a Monster App
Create a Monster App
Faces iMake
Art Doodles
Ideas: as students are individually sketching ideas for an upcoming art design, pass the ipad around the room and have each contribute to a class design. Watch it build on the screen through the projector.

Art Puzzles
Art Puzzles: Sliding Slices
Find an art puzzle that relates to the art subject or artist that your art project is based on. Let each student make one move until it's solved. Keep track of how many moves it takes to solve and see if they can beat other classes' scores.

Quizzes
You can make your own quizzes in Educreations or use a pre-made interactive quiz from the art section of BrainPop App.

Idea: pass the ipad from one group to the next giving them the first chance at getting the correct answer.

Interactive eBooks
Find an ebook that ties in nicely with what you're learning in art class. We made monsters from shapes . When finished I had student's take turns turning the page in There is a  Monster at the End of this Book
starring Groover. We used a Finding Nemo interactive puzzle book  to accompany our monochromatic fish lesson too.

Digital Portfolio

Don't forget that an ipad is a video camera and still camera too. 
Photograph and upload art with the 
Artsonia app
Use Evernote to collect images
Use Dropbox app to collect images

Let your ipad roam!
Mirror your ipad through your projector wirelessly with
Apple TV
Reflection App
Then pass the ipad around the room.
No wifi? You can create a closed network and still mirror your ipad with a laptop hooked up to a projector.

I have so much to say about this digital graphic design lesson based on the painting Christina's World created on the ipads that I wrote it up as an article for School Arts magazine. Hopefully I will be able to share every last detail with you if it is accepted for publication.

Meanwhile, I wanted to share some resources that I made to accompany the lesson so you can explore these ideas now while you might have time. How to use instant alpha on a mac to erase the background is  in the beginning of this video. How to use the magic wand tool from photoshop to do the same thing is in this video.

I erased Christina out of Andrew Wyeth's original piece, Christina's World. View the video below to learn how to do it in both Keynote and Photoshop Elements. The end of the video shows a student creating the artwork on the ipad using the Brushes App.
The key to making this project work with students is the Dropbox app for sharing and accessing images for the ipad.
View our online art gallery of completed student work for this project. Many students wrote a bit in their artist statements explaining the new story they intended to tell.

Way back when I was first playing with iMovie to make videos for my students I had to go through a very complicated process to do special effects. Be Kind to Your Erasers was filmed as two layers: one for the the finger and one for the lips. I used a third-party plug-in to create a picture in picture FX and did my best to layer the lips on to the fingers. It was inaccurately placed at times if the finger moved too much and the coloring didn't blend well. But, the results worked for me. I was only trying to convince my students to be kind to their erasers.
I remember destroying a Barbie Doll for the hair, painting a finger themed school room background, and using a twist tie for glasses. I was having a blast, giggling and playing like a 10 year old while putting the story together. I think I spent only a day or two of my summer vacation working on this video, but learned enough about editing imovie, script writing, and organizing a video to start doing this with my students the following school year. This is my favorite way to learn technology; by playing.

Now that I've acquired an iPad, I'm finding that there are apps that can be used for awesome video FX that would make recreating this movie much easier.
Funny Movie Maker- layers video over images (the lips effect). example
Paper Camera- makes rotoscoped looking videos. example
Doink-makes animated movies a piece of cake (like Flash but easier interface). example
Brushes- makes video from every stroke and choice made in creating art. example
FaceJack- does what Blabberize does for making an image talk. example
Puppet Pals or Explain Everything-make animated videos w/audio example

What else can we add to this list? Please chime in!

The best way for me to learn new software, apps, or new tech tools is to dive in and try to make things with them.  I'm motivated by my desire to create. As I become absorbed in my creative flow, I troubleshoot, problem-solve, explore the possibilities, make connections to my previous knowledge, and imagine future uses for my new discoveries.

This is what I've been doing this week while shut indoors with the heat wave baking the Chicagoland area. But, this is also what I hope my students do everyday they are in my classroom. The desire to create makes learning fun and meaningful. 

I played with these apps: popsicolor, procreate, picture show, instagram, photo shake to digitally paint on the ipad. Learn about my discoveries below. 
Click images to view them large.

I also tried using the Doink Express app for this quick animation. We have the full version of Doink at school and made some amazing things with 3rd graders (see this post: The Aliens have Landed). This app is less money but still very powerful (and fun since you can add your voice). 

My students put together a video called,  "Push Up Your Sleeves" this year. This video was intended to be played before each of our new fugleflicks. But, when I saw how cute the final product turned out,  I thought the students needed to be recognized for their tiny video before I buried it in a video logo segment. So, Push Up Your Sleeves was entered into our district film festival and a local film festival where the students were commended for their creativity.

Yesterday I finally took the tie to work on the video logo. Here is how I made it:

The logo itself is designed in Comic Life iPad App (for the text) and Brushes App (for the image). Then I animated in Keynote (desktop version) and converted to quicktime. 

I composed the first segment of music on a web based garageband-like site called soundation.com. They let me download it as a .wav file.

Then I put all the video and audio together in imovie and uploaded it to vimeo.