TRICIA FUGLESTAD

3-5 | The Arts | Other

My Classroom Innovation

I have been creatively finding ways to enthrall, engage, enrich, and enhance learning in my art room over the past 18 years with technology tools, web 2.0 sites, hand held devices, student produced digital stories, student created music, poems, and videos. My classroom is a place where students engage in creative, collaborative, and reflective practices as they work on their content rich art projects. I showcase their work online through my website, on our online art gallery on Artsonia.com, and with our digital portfolios. My student’s educational art related videos, called Fugleflicks (http://www.drydenart.notlong.com) engage students using a multi-modal approach. The filmmakers storyboard, write lyrics, sing, dance, act, operate the equipment, and edit the movie. Many movies have won local and national awards and have been screened in international student film festivals. I am currently hosting a national collaborative art project called, A Brush with Fame centered on the star of our most famous Fugleflick, Young Sloppy Brush. The brush is visiting 30 art rooms around the country during the school year sharing his tragic message of neglect and abuse. His journey is documented on his wikispace with an interactive map and photos from his visits. (http://youngsloppybrush.wikispaces.com/)

How Students were Engaged

I have written grants, created fundraisers, and pursued resources to fill my art room with 21st century tools to give my students the chance to creatively explore and create. We use flip cameras for reflective interviews, the interactive whiteboard to demo, draw, manipulate, animate, the document camera to see the details, the webcam to digitally enter artwork, the green screen to go anywhere their imaginations take them. My students come to art excited to learn and leave inspired. They think the art room is magical. My job is to keep that magic alive along with the love of learning.

PBS Program/Content Used

Teaching for Multiple Intelligences and Connecting Family, Community and Schools