Live Tweeting the Museum and a Virtual Art Classroom | Arts Education Roundup: News, updates and resource spotlights in arts education
Virtually There
How many art teachers dream of getting a working studio artist face-to-face with their students? The Virtually There project by Kids’ Own is a new virtual artist-in-residence programme in Northern Ireland that’s using technology to do just that. A shared interactive whiteboard installed in classrooms and video-conferencing software offers art students a window into an artist’s studio and lets artists and students speak to one another live while they work on collaborative arts projects.
Check out some of the amazing projects Virtually There has supported on their site.
#ITweetMuseums
If you haven’t explored the #ITweetMuseums hashtag thread and twitter handle, Guggenheim Registrar Mark Schlemmer’s labor of love, make sure to check it out. This grassroots initiative, which operates outside of official museum social media accounts, has gotten museum goers and art enthusiasts to tweet and share over a thousand images of scenes, artworks and encounters from inside museums. The campaign lets you follow what influencers are looking at, find new or interesting works from your favorite museum, or strike up a conversation on Twitter about a specific work.
Also worth exploring is its off-shoot #MetDetails, a tweet-up (where a group of people pick a time and a place to live tweet about something) in which museum professionals live tweeted from inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
New National Core Arts Standards Launches
Over 6,000 arts educators, artists, parents and students collaborated on the new National Core Arts Standards, which enjoyed an official launch yesterday in Times Square at an event hosted by Robert Lynch, President of Americans for Arts, and musician/arts education activist Ben Folds. The standards which guide pre-K through high school art curriculums in schools around the country have not been updated since 1994. What’s new about these? They are the first to include standards on new media arts, including support of teaching code literacy and interface design.
