Art Junction—Featured Article


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.