I Like To Draw Stuff.

Creating things is what drives me in life. I figured out pretty early on that constantly creating is kind of like breathing to me. I work a lot, and I find it hard to say no to things, but I also LIKE to make things. 

Most people equate creating = ART, and for some of us, that's true, but honestly any kind of making is good with me. I waste a ridiculous amount of time finding the perfect image, graphic, font, color, etc. when I design slide decks for presentations, or I'm designing a lesson for class. It's all still creating, in my opinion. 

But, traditional art is also my jam. This past school year, I was dragged back into the art room to teach 8th grade art, and I was instantly reminded how much I love to draw. If we could just hang out for 45 minutes each day, free draw until the end of class, and go on our merry way, I'd be in heaven. But, you know, grades and such... hmph.

Ok, so I have a couple of drawing things going on at the moment. Like this Slidesmania template I got to collaborate on! I was so excited to come across a random tweet calling for some sketchnote-y drawings to be used on a slides theme! 

You can download this theme, called Doodles, for free (and read more of the story) here:
https://slidesmania.com/doodles-free-template-for-google-slides-or-powerpoint-presentations/

Shout-out to Omar Lopez for his sweet icon work in this slide deck, too!

For those wondering, I draw primarily on my iPad using an Apple Pencil and the Procreate app. My friends Manuel and Sadie first turned me on to these tools and I've never looked back - they're hands-down my favorites!

If you like these little sketches, I've got more exciting drawing plans in the future, so stay tuned!


- Mrs L.

Art +Technology: A Picture Person Project

In another life I was an art teacher. For 13 years, in fact! I've never lost my love for art, so when my son started kindergarten and the PTA was looking for a parent to act as the "Art Mom" (called "Picture Person" in my son's district), I jumped at the chance.

The program in my son's district is through the Picturing America program, which, I gotta tell ya, made me a little disappointed at first. I wanted full freedom to choose my own artists and activities! But it really makes sense - by using this program, we ensure that grade levels and volunteers don't overlap or repeat.

For one of my visits, I chose the painting George Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze. I adapted one of my favorite former 6th grade art projects to fit the kindergarten level. I took photos of the students wearing a cape, tri-corner hat, and holding a play sword, and superimposed them into the painting!

If you do some Googley-searching you can find links back to my old art blog, including this entry that talks a little about our Kehinde Wiley project. (Ugh thanks to Photobucket - that's sarcastic, by the way - most of my old blog images are now broken links.) Kehinde Wiley poses his models in classical poses after Baroque-style portraiture. We used this as inspiration when posing for our George Washington photos.

While the photos were being taken, students worked at their tables. They used colored pencil to add patterned backgrounds to a black and white photocopy of the original painting, to mimic the highly ornate backgrounds in a Wiley painting:

image via

At home, I worked to layer the original painting with the student photos we had just taken. I did a presentation at a PTA workshop for the other volunteers that details the whole process below:

This "picture person" project was really fun because it allowed me to combine my love of art and technology into one fun project. I sent color printouts of the final images home, along with a quick note explaining what we did in class. I got a lot of positive feedback from the parents and the students seemed to really enjoy dressing up and being a part of the artwork!

- Mrs L.

Free Printable Ozobot Costume Template!

Happy (almost) Halloween! It's my favorite holiday, and I was trying to "dress up" my Ozobots for Halloween. I used some of the extra covers from our classroom kit to make this cute Frankenstein costume, and I used the OzoGroove app to make him dance to the Monster Mash. Here's a short clip:

I made a custom @OZOBOT Frankenstein that dances to the Monster Mash for Halloween! 🎃 #ozobot #igniteD205 #halloween #frankenstein #robot pic.twitter.com/rQmkCyQsGP

— Jennifer Leban (@mrsleban) October 27, 2017

Then, a couple more bots got the costume treatment:

I had so much fun with this that I wanted students to be able to make costumes for their Ozobots, too! I don't have enough extra Ozobot "shells" to give one to each student, so paper seemed like a logical and simple solution. I searched the internet, only to discover that there really isn't much in the way of paper templates for decorating Ozobots... so I went ahead and made one myself! 

Ok, so my sample decorations aren't exactly super-detailed, but you get the idea. I'd rather students use their own creativity and show ME how they can be used to make their bots awesome! 

Want your own printable template? Click on the image below for the full size pdf file version:

If you do make any Ozobot costumes from this template, I'd love to see them, so please tag me in any posts! Thanks!

- Mrs L.

DIY Techie Craft Ideas for Back-To-School

It's that time of year! I'm back after taking some summer time off to recharge, be a mom, and do some home improvement projects over the summer. It's been great, but it's time to start thinking about school again. My five-year-old starts kindergarten this fall, and he loves looking at school supplies. Hmm... I think he gets that from me?

So we were watching some YouTube videos about DIY school supplies and came across some super fun tech-related projects that Iggy and I had to make, and that I just had to share here.  Check it out!

Cord taco vs cord donut. Who will win?

Earbud cords are forever getting tangled, or lost/broken in your backpack or pencil case, amirite? We've got two new different solutions that you can try out this school year! The past couple of years, I was totally pushing the "mint-container-as-earbuds-holder" craft idea, but I've got a couple of new ones that I think are equally as functional and fun.

The first one is a "cord taco" made from craft foam and velcro dots. My son decided to try his hand at the "cord pizza," and loved it so much that he made one for his dad, too. Here he is, hard at work:

He's not exactly coordinated enough for painting (or patient enough!) just yet, so Iggy opted to decorate his foam cord keepers using colorful permanent markers. I used acrylic paint though for mine.

The second item was a "cord donut" made from Perler beads. This is actually where our crafts all started. My son is hooked on these tiny plastic beads that you place onto a pegboard, and then melt to fuse together using an iron. He started out making flat images of Ghostbusters and monsters and such, but has started to graduate to 3-D creations. I was researching the best glue to use when I came across the DIY for a cord donut. How could I NOT try it out? It's a donut!

And once you go down the YouTube rabbit hole of ideas, it tends to snowball. I became obsessed with the idea of a lipstick USB drive, and had to try to make one for myself:

The trick here is finding a USB drive that's small enough to fit into your empty lipstick tube! I got mine on Amazon, but still had to do a little tweaking via a sanding block to get mine to fit just right... but it's super cute, don't you think? 

Here's my complete playlist with the DIY directions on how to make these (and other) fun tech and school supplies!

BONUS CRAFT: 

If you follow me on Instagram, you probably saw how I made myself the ultimate finger pointer stick for my whiteboard this school year, inspired by one of my all-time favorite movies, School of Rock:

Heavy metal rock hand for the win!

Hope your school year gets off to an awesome start!

- Mrs L.

Museums Are Awesome With Museum Hack!

I had the unique opportunity to take a Museum Hack tour at the Art Institute of Chicago over winter break. Although this doesn't technically fall under a "tech blog" umbrella, it does count as a teaching topic, so I'm going to share my experience here. Also, it was super fun, so who wouldn't want to know about something fun AND educational to do in your city?

Museums are awesome. They're everywhere. You can learn a TON while you're there. But, like many other teaching tools, the way in which you use it will affect people's motivations and engagement towards learning. For most museums, you can't just show up and yell "Hey, entertain me!" and expect it to be fun and exciting.

However, with Museum Hack... you sort of can! Museum Hack leads "renegade" museum tours (currently in NYC, DC, San Francisco, and Chicago) that are engaging, interactive, and entertaining! As a former visual arts teacher, I was super intrigued by how Museum Hack would take the Art Institute and "hack" it for our tour group.

Our tour guide's name was Elise, and she was super friendly and welcoming. We met our group in the museum's main stairway entrance (after buying our tickets and checking our coats), and were given name tags. There was a group of eight adults, not counting our tour guide. This was awesome for me because it was easy to remember who was in my group, and to follow the group through the museum.

The Art Institute is HUGE. Our two-hour tour was a whirlwind sample buffet of artworks throughout time and cultures. Elise delighted in telling us all about the "saucy" details of Rococo art, and the epic "comic book" panels of St John the Baptist, including a ridiculous and gratuitously bloody beheading scene:

A good half of the tour is finding out interesting facts and little-known/fun trivia bits about different pieces in the museum, and the other half was interactive - we participated in a variety of games and fun discussions about the artworks.

Of course, our tour included Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat, where we all had our Ferris Bueller moment staring at the various subjects within the landscape, and selecting our favorites:

This is Elise. She likes that weird character facing away from us that looks like a keyhole. I never even noticed that before!

One of our interactive moments included a game in a smaller gallery where we selected furniture and decorative items for Elise's fictional "housewarming" party for rich people. We got to select an item from the gallery that we would bring for her new house. Then we hilariously tried to connect them together ("Ohh that bowl would look great on the table Jen picked! And we could hang Todd's creepy painting above it!").

Another fun game was had in the sculpture gallery where we were tasked with choosing a sculpture that represented our "spirit animal." My husband and I chose one for each other. His was an epic beard-off with this guy:

Elise took polaroids of us with our sculptures, and we got to take them home as souvenirs. We also wrote postcards about our experience that will be sent later on. Dang, when was the last time you can remember writing a postcard? So that was fun.

We went over to the modern wing, and it was no surprise to me that we stopped at every kid's favorite sculpture in the entire museum:

This piece is called Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) by Félix González-Torres. Yes, you get to actually participate in the piece by taking and eating candy. In the museum. It's always funny because people are so trained to NOT touch the artwork, or to get too close, that it feels taboo to actually take and eat candy! I found a fun article here all about where the candy comes from and how it gets refilled.  

Probably my favorite part of the tour though was when we were asked to re-enact a Surrealist painting of random nudes in the forest:

Here we were, just being goofy, and all of a sudden I realized that a bunch of regular museum patrons had stopped and were watching us, smiling. Yes, a bunch of adults re-creating this very random artwork must have been incredibly entertaining. You're welcome.

But it the end, this got me thinking about how much a teacher can learn from this tour: how easy it can be to engage a group of students by simply making them get up out of their seats and physically mimic an image or concept, or by having them choose an item from a whole grouping and explain their choices.

But most of all, by not taking any of this too seriously, we were able to relax and have fun, and probably retained way more information about works of art than any other prior visit. Without even trying!

I really enjoyed my Museum Hack tour, and if you are in a city that Museum Hack conducts tours in, I highly recommend going on one! Museum Hack offers general tours (like the one I went on), but they also offer private/family tours, tours for parties, and team-building adventures! Can you even imagine, a professional development activity like this?

A girl can only dream...

- Mrs. L.

Awesome Avatars Using Google Draw!

My all-time favorite project in computer lit class is one that I call "Google Doodle Yourself" using Google Draw. You can use Google Draw to create your own illustrator-esque portraits, which are awesome for having students use as avatars. The best part is that this is actually quite simple to do! It doesn't need to be perfect in order to come out realistically. It's up to you how detailed you want to go with it.

I use this YouTube video in class to show students how it's done:

I love that you can take a picture right on the spot, but you can also upload existing photos, which lends itself to creating portraits of friends and family for gifts or other surprise things!

The trick to creating these images is the line drawing tool called "curve," which smoothes out any shapes that you make. It gives your shapes a cool cutout style for that all-around freehand-ish drawn look.

The only downside of Google Draw that I've discovered so far is that there isn't an iOS app for it. But I like to use it on Chrome (via Chromebook, Macbook, or PC laptop) using a mouse to help with the fine motor skills required if you wanna get the details looking good.

The other thing to keep in mind is that shapes work on layers, so it's important to work from largest shapes to smallest shapes when tracing, so that you can select the tiny shapes without the larger ones blocking access. Then, when filling in the shapes, you work backwards, smallest to biggest. If you mess up, no biggie, because there's an "Arrange --> Order" function that will allow you to move shapes forward or back as needed.

When you're all done, you can download your drawing as .pdf, .svg, .jpg, or .png - or you can just screen grab it, too! And from there, the possibilities are endless!

This is one of my favorite new computer tricks!
Enjoy!

-Mrs. L.

Let's Talk About Graphic Design

I made this slide show on graphic design concepts for student presentations (a presentation about presentations, mind you!) and I showed it to my 6th grade students today as part of our Google Slides project. I think that this information would be helpful for all students (and teachers, and administrators) in all kinds of subject areas!

So I'm embedding it here for others to see and potentially use. Just credit back to me, please. I assembled it pretty much from past student work - both successful and not-so-successful. And my past visual arts teaching and expertise helped quite a bit, too. :)

- Mrs. L.

Google Draw Idea: Locker Laurels

At Sandburg, we have this tradition that was started last year called "locker laurels," where students attach small signs to their locker to represent various clubs/sports/groups/teams that they are members of here at school. Some students have quite a few on the front of their lockers!

Mr Walker and I thought it would be funny to create a series of locker laurels for random reasons and to covertly tape them to empty lockers around the school... to see if anyone noticed. A sort of art installation/performance art hybrid deal. After toying with a few ideas, the "Mr. Gail Fan Club" emerged:

I used an awesome simple graphic design website, called Canva, to design the laurels.  A funny thing happened though. As the students began to notice the laurels around the school, they began to take them to put on their own lockers! Others asked Mr. Gail how they, too, could join the Mr. Gail fan club. Awesome!

A few teachers were confused by them and took them down completely and threw them out. Whomp whomp. Well, it was fun while it lasted. 

The other side effect of this endeavor was that it was the inspiration for a Google Draw assignment for 7th graders. Students can design their OWN locker laurel, a personal logo, if you will, to display on their locker! Something like this, maybe:

I'd love to have the kids use Canva, but since the TOS lists 13+ as the age for users, I have to reconsider the tool for creation. Google Draw should do nicely in this case. I used it for my laurel pictured above. 

As an alternative to a personal design, students could choose a team or activity here at school and design a laurel for that group. Who knows, maybe it could actually be used in the future!

- Mrs. L.