ishbel morag

Allentown Art Museum’s interactive educational web site. The Renaissance Connection is supported by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and The Rider-Pool Foundation. This is a quirky web site, full of information and visuals, to keep students and teachers occupied for ages. It has some very interesting lesson plans as well. One on Egg tempera, good experiment to engage in. This could be directly linked to artists of today, using these older techniques, for instance Peter Godwin. Other lesson plans such as on Printing could be related back to todays advances in the media and internet, email use and software technology. Thank you Mariella for this link!

Dr Geoff Romeo, Faculty of Education Monash University suggests 4 basic principles- Learner centred environments, Knowledge centred environments, assessment centred environments and community centred environments.

Learners are encouraged to be active and “take charge of their own learning” – for instance looking out for web sites that are of interest and engaging in the educational material that they present. “Potential technology in education to bring real-world problems into the classroom” for the visual arts would be streamed audio and video -for instance through the Art Gallery of NSW – Monet and the Impressionist exhibition: smh.com.au has put together an audio/visual with a small portion of interactive content. This interactive segement has interesting possibilities for Photoshop use- looking at textures and close-ups etc. The Art Gallery of NSW also has an educational kit which has web site link for instance to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston where the works originate and other links. Other interactive websites which are not so educational but just for fun, include a memory game from Linda B’s site.

In terms of ‘Knowledge Centred Environment’ making connections and commenting on the experiences through blogs or school discussion boards, etc is a good way to convey interest and ideas. Through ‘Assessment Centred Environment’ self-evaluation and peer-assessment is important and of course teacher feed-back which can be on-going through emails.

‘Community Centred Environment’ can include broader issues and being involved in blogs sites and other online communication sites.