Introducing
Artsconnected
Kevan Nitzberg
Art instructor
Anoka-Hennepin School District
Coon Rapids, Minnesota
Artsconnected
(www.artsconnected.org)
is the product of a partnership between The Minneapolis Institute of
Arts and the Walker Art Center. Using the power of the Internet to stimulate
new approaches to learning, the goal of Artsconnected is to make arts
education timely, engaging, interactive, and pertinent for both teachers
and students of all ages. The Minnesota Department of Children, Families
and Learning through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature
is a major source of funding for many of the resources that have been
developed for Artsconnected.
The Artsconnected
experience includes:
- a user-friendly
Web site with access to the combined art collections, libraries, and
archives of the Walker Art Center and The Minneapolis Institute of
Arts.
- full-color
digital images of works of art, audio and video samples, and textual
information that bring the resources of the Walker Art Center and
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts to life online.
- more
than 80 online lesson plans and curriculum units for K-12 teachers,
reflecting the newly instituted Minnesota Graduation Standards and
the National Content Standards in the Arts.
- online
activities for all age groups that range from simple exercises on
color and scale to complex 3D environments.
- a link
to ArtsNet Minnesota which contains four thematic curriculum units
developed with arts educators throughout the state, entitled Environment,
Identity, Inner Worlds, and What is Art?
- links
to other Web sites to help teachers, students, and their families
use the Internet as a tool for learning about the arts.
More
helpful pointers . . .
To arrange onsite training, a listing of trainers and how to
contact them is provided when you click on the Minnesota map on the
Artsconnected home page located at: www.artsconnected.org.
For online
instruction in using Artsconnected you can participate in monthly chats
that are given through the Teachers Professional Institute, otherwise
known as Tappedin.org.
For a listing of monthly chats, you can access their online session
calendar at: www.tappedin.org/cgi-bin/calendar/calendar.cgi.
For more
help there is an Artsconnected online tutorial that you can access at
:
www.artsconnected.org/tutorial.
The tutorial contains a terrific range of hands-on experiences that
will help to get you ‘better acquainted’ with Artsconnected
as you are given a chance to explore some of the site’s features.
There is
also a downloadable Teacher’s Guide that can be found at ‘For
Your Classroom’ at www.artsconnected.org/classroom.
A webboard for teachers (and others) has been provided to answer any
questions that you may have that tend to crop up from time to time.
The webboard can be accessed at: www.artsconnected.org:8080/~teacher.
A pretty
helpful fellow who you can find on the main page of Artsconnected is
the ‘search wizard’ who can be found by clicking on site
tour at the bottom of the screen. The wizard will give you a quick overview
of all of the icon-marked sites on the main page. The individual areas
of Artsconnected consist of: the Art Gallery;For Your Classroom; the
Playground; and Search All. Each of these areas have special features
worth noting:
In the
Art Gallery:
- a
searchable art database.
- Art
Collector - allows you to assemble digitized images of
the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Walker Art Center’s
collections, and add text to those images. (See links at the end
of this article for examples of collections made with the Art Collector.)
- Art
Sampler - provides a random sampling of 10 works of art
at a time from the two museums’ collections, allowing you
to look at examples of artwork without having any specific artist,
medium or particular work in mind.
- Through
Your Eyes - offers a sampling of different experiences
of visitors to the artwork that they experienced when visiting the
exhibits at the Walker Art Center.
- Surrounded
by Beauty - explores a wide variety of artworks by Native
Americans from different geographic areas across North America.
- More
Adventures - includes a number of pre-made, interactive
programs from the museums that are available to view and to work
with here, ranging from a mythology site to one that deals with
a series of different styles that help to define Modernism.
In For
Your Classroom:
Educational
database - search by type of experience, grade level, and/or
museum collection.
- Theme
studies available through a link to ArtsEdNet Minnesota.
- Downloadable
teacher’s guide.
- Online
resources for teaching and learning about the arts.
- Professional
resources.
- Minnesota
Profile of Learning.
- The
Search Wizard.
In the
Playground:
- A
series of online activities that are grade level
appropriate which allow students to explore aspects of art through
making, finding, exploring, watching and listening.
In the
Library and Archives:
- Audio
transcripts of live interviews with famous artists.
- Methods
employed in restoring artwork.
- Connections
to both Minnesota libraries and the U.S. Library of Congress.
In Search
All:
- Multiple
search database.
- Listing
of a variety of resources available at both museums.
Technology
concerns and requirements . . .
Of course, as this is an online mode of interacting with information,
there are technology issues that need to be dealt with from time to
time. All of the necessary plug-ins can be easily accessed from the
site by visiting “For Best Viewing” located at: www.artsconnected.org/about/viewing.shtml.
There is
an additional page that gives further technological information regarding
the site at ‘Nuts and Bolts’ that is also linked to the
‘About Artsconnected’ page and can be accessed directly
by going to: www.artsconnected.org/about/nuts.shtml.
Goals
for Online Artsconnected Learning . . .
The overarching goal for engaging in Artsconnected is to make users
comfortable with using the resources that are provided in the combined
Minneapolis Institute/Walker Art Center interactive Web site. Along
the way, the additional benefits that will hopefully be realized include:
- providing
a format for greater learner directed experiences.
- providing
teachers with tools for creating and delivering technology enhanced
curriculum.
- efficient
implementation of standards based education.
- acquisition
of interdisciplinary teaching and learning strategies.
- engagement
in a cultural, historical and artistic appreciation of the world through
interacting with the artwork and accompanying information from the
Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Walker Art Center.
Ready to
begin your own ArtsConnected adventure? Click here
to begin.
Sample
collections created with the Art Collector. . .
The following collections demonstrate someof the ways that
the Art Collector can be used to produce online resources for use in
an art classroom:
Contact
Kevan Nitzberg at knitzber@ties2.net
with questions or comments about Artsconnected including the date of
his next online training session at Tapped In.
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