Tricia Fuglestad's Blog

The Giving Tree

5/15/2014

My second graders were introduced to a lovely story called, The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein as they began creating tree silhouettes. I first heard the story in college when my roommate Beth, an elementary education major, practiced reading to me. She chose some amazing stories that will forever be my favorites. What made this even more special was when my friend, Suzanne Tiedemann recorded the chorus of the Giving Tree Song. Listen here or below.

listen to ‘The Giving Tree Chorus’ on Audioboo

Way back I created a movie from the book. I colored each page digitally and recorded my voice reading the story to share with my students. Viewthe movie here or below.

I was recently reminded of this story when I saw the tree stumps in my neighborhood. The emerald ash borer destroyed a whole block of ash trees. The stump in this book would still be happy as long as it could be of use.

See the photo of the cut down trees here.

Before we started drawing students each had a turn at the interactive board to trace a "V" in the tree. This helped us make sense of the tree's design as we began to create.

Tracing "v"s in trees as we prepare to draw https://t.co/Sl5jkzOpTc
— Tricia Fuglestad (@fuglefun) May 13, 2014

My students fell in LOVE with the song that Ms. Tiedemann shared (see above). So, they asked me to put the words on the board so they could sing while they draw their giving trees. They called it an "emotional" song that brought more meaning to their art.

The giving tree from Tricia Fuglestad on Vimeo.

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Interactive Art with Green Screen App

2/22/2014

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The Green Screen app by DoInk is designed for chroma key effects, however it just dawned on me yesterday that it can be used the way I was using custom photo booth effects! This is a huge bonus for our art students. Now we can take any image with want students to interact with using video/audio and have students speak through it. It's not hard at all to make anything interactive!

Enter Any Art from Tricia Fuglestad on Vimeo.

First you need to download these two apps to your iPad. Click the images for links.
Then watch the video below to see how to do get your image ready for interactivity!

Green Screen App by DoInk

Superimpose App

Making art interactive from Tricia Fuglestad on Vimeo.

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Donor's Choose iPad Project.
We're so close to our 1:1 Art Room iPad goal.
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Thank you!

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Making the Art Room Interactive

9/26/2013

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Since we have so many Fugleflicks and audio stories connected with so many things on display in the art room, I decided today to start making the art room more interactive. Audioboo allows us to upload our audio files, a photo, and generates a QR code. I printed the codes and placed them next to the items in the room that have a story or song connected with them. For example, here is the pencil exchange.

Scan or click the code to see our growing collection of interactive songs/stories to learn more about our art room or click through the items below.

We have been thinking about QR codes in the art room lately because of our hope to have 1:1 access to iPads by the end of the school year. I even created a Fugleflick Scan-View-Learn book for students to explore our favorite art related movies independently.

Help us get enough funding for iPads here.
Or vote for sonic to fund our project here.

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Enter the Interactive Fountain

7/27/2013

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Digitally interact with Chicago's interactive Crown Fountain!

Crown Fountain Custom Photo Booth Effect from Tricia Fuglestad on Vimeo.

The Crown Fountain is an interactive piece of public art installed in 2004 over a granite reflecting pool in Chicago's Millennium Park. The two 50 foot fountains feature video footage of many faces that appear to interact with the visitors who splash in their waters. Learn more here.

I made a digital template of one of the fountains based on the photo shown that students can use in a number of ways to interact digitally with this interactive fountain. The template was made in Sketchbook Express (free app) largely using the line and shape tools. I then exported the image to my laptop where I can easily erase the space in the fountain using PREVIEW and save it as a png.
Download my template here.

I created a Custom Photo Booth Effect by using the PNG image in the Quartz Composer clown template. This allowed me to make a video inside the Crown Fountain much like the way you see the fountain in life. I made this video into an animated GIF with 5seconds app.
Download my custom photobooth FX
Click to view the directions for installing

I finally found the perfect use for the Color Lake App which creates a still or animated reflecting pool in a portion of a photo. The free version only takes a still image of the reflecting pool.
I haven't figured out a way to layer video and photo on the iPad yet. I'm hoping the new version of DOINK will give me more creative options. Heard it will be great!
Wouldn't it be fun to animate the water the spurts from the mouth?

Click to grab my template

My Custom Photo Booth FX made into Gif

Add the reflecting pool w/ Color Lake App

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American Gothic Spoof-o-Matic

10/31/2012

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A student asked this week, "What makes a painting famous?"
I thought about it for a minute and said, when it becomes popular enough to be recognizable. One way you can tell that a piece of art is famous is because it found its way to the popular culture as a spoof.

How would you answer this?

My fourth graders are preparing to create a spoof of Grant Wood's American Gothic.

Update: I packaged up the drawing guide

American Gothic Spoof Drawing Guide

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Making an Interactive Game in Mimio

8/30/2012

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We LOVE our interactive board in the art room. It gets used everyday in almost every class period in so many different ways. I started collecting ideas a while back for how we use our IWB and began a wiki to share some of our lessons. I love to use Mimio Studio software for building interactive games since they offer a free download of the software, a community site to share files, and PC and MAC users are all welcome. I use mimio on a polyvision board. It doesn't matter what the IWB brand is since the software running on my computer creates the interactivity experience.

As I was preparing to teach this collage lesson to my 4th graders based on Pablo Picasso's Old Guitarist, I thought that a scramble/reassemble activity would be a fun way to encourage students to study the image. This could be done a number of ways, but I thought I'd try to make it digitally in Mimio Studio.
-->This file can be downloaded here<--
In the tutorial below you can see how to play the puzzle with varying levels of difficulty and how to make one yourself using keynote and preview (on a Mac) along with Mimio Studio. All this has been added to my Art is Interactive Wiki here.

Old Guitar Puzzle and Tutorial from Tricia Fuglestad on Vimeo.

Playing our new #artsed @mimiotechnology puzzle game on the IWB -download it from my Fugleblog twitter.com/fuglefun/statu…
— Tricia Fuglestad (@fuglefun) September 4, 2012