Art Educators Web 2.0

I had a lot of trouble finding a 2.0 webquest (I might have been searching the wrong things) but the webquest I found was http://www.slideshare.net/guest4771c2/webquest-art-thief . The task is to find out information about different pieces of art so you can decide which ones you want to steal. The teacher uses websites to find out which ones would be the best and to do research. A really interesting website I found though was for http://edutechintegration.blogspot.com/ where there is different technologies that can be used in our webquests. Just looking at them got me thinking of different ways to incorporate them into my curriculum with technology. Technology helps in learning and teaching because it is incorporating something that is typically familiar and combining it with their assignments. Students are usually introduced to computers at a young age so they are typically comfortable using them in school. Incorporating technology in the art classroom gives the students other uses for computers and new inventions other than just typing up papers and research. I would improve the project I found by having the students somehow create their own piece of art. I think an interesting project would be if they created another piece to add in with the pieces they “stole”. I am definitely looking forward to using the webquest technologies as well as websites and other programs in my teaching.

For my own webquest I would like to somehow use the Google Art Project (http://www.googleartproject.com/) website. It’s an online tool where you can look at pieces of art from all over the world and even virtually tour different galleries. You can also create your own gallery which I think would be interesting in using in my webquest so that either I create a gallery of pieces I think are important and have my students pick some of those to create a collection, OR I could have each student (or pairs) curate their own gallery and explain why and then look at other students’ galleries. Along with that, I think a useful part of Google Art Project is that you can zoom up really far on a piece of art and I think it would be a cool project if students zoomed  in on a piece of art and then recreated that piece. Composition could be explained before that so they create interesting works of art.