Three Good Places to Find Art Lessons

The website of The Metropolitan Museum of Art contains some great resources for teachers and students. The first place that teachers will want to check out is the lessons plan page. On the lessons plan page you will find three dozen lesson plans to accompany online features about the art of Egypt, Europe, Africa, and Asia.

The Museum of Modern Art offers a sizable collection of online resources for teaching art lessons. Part of that collection is a series of lesson plans, but there are also collections of art for students, an art game for young (5-8 years old) students, interactive activities for older students, and podcasts about art and artists. The MOMA lesson plans collection can be searched by theme, artist, medium, or subject. If the lesson plans in the collection don't offer quite what you're looking for, MOMA has free resources you can use in developing your own plans. MOMA offers many images and PDFs that you can use in developing own lessons and or slideshows.

Art Babble is a video website designed and maintained by the Indianapolis Museum of Art. The purpose of Art Babble is to provide a place for people to learn about the creation of art, artists, and collections through quality video productions. Visitors to Art Babble will find videos related to many forms of and formats for art. Browse the video channels and you'll find videos covering a wide array of topics including abstract art, European Art and Design, African Art, graphic design, glass, sculpture, surrealism, and much more.

Listen Edition Offers an Edmodo App for Teaching With Current Events

Listen Edition is a service that organizes current events lessons around public radio stories. Now these stories and lessons are available through the Listen Edition Edmodo app. Each story is accompanied by a list of vocabulary words for students and a pre-made Socrative quiz.

Applications for Education
Short audio recordings an make the news and other stories accessible to more students. Listen Edition allows your students to listen to the stories multiple times before answering the Socrative questions. Socrative offers good tools for seeing how your students are responding to questions online.

Tackk - Create Webpages for Announcements, Assignments, and Digital Portfolios

Tackk is a free service that you can use to quickly create simple webpages. Using Tackk you can create a page to announce an important event, to advertise an event, or to show off your best digital works. I initially tried the service a couple of years ago and I revisited it today after receiving an email about their new education section. The education section of Tackk includes examples and ideas for using the service in your classroom.

To create a Tackk page you do not need to register for an account, but unregistered Tackk pages expire after seven days. If you register for the service your Tackk pages stay up indefinitely. I registered for the service before creating my first Tackk page. Creating my Tackk was a simple matter of uploading an image then adding text in the customizable fields above and below my image. Tackk pages can accommodate videos, audio files, and maps, but I did not include those items in my first Tackk page.

Applications for Education
Tackk could be a good tool for students to use to quickly create a page to show off some of their digital photography, video creation projects, or audio files. Student groups looking to create a landing page for a fundraising event may want to give Tackk a try too.

Google Drive Add-ons for GAFE Domains

Last month Google released a new Google Drive feature in the form of Add-ons for Google Documents and Sheets. Those features were initially added to consumer Google Accounts (@gmail accounts). Yesterday, Add-ons were added to Google Apps for Education domains. If you are a GAFE user and have not seen Add-ons appear as an option in your Google Drive account, contact your domain's administrator. GAFE domain administrators can enable or disable Add-ons for users.


Applications for Education
Some of the Add-ons for Docs and Sheets that jump out as being particularly useful to teachers and students are EasyBib for creating bibliographies, Kaizena shortcut for adding voice comments to Google Documents, and Table of Contents.

Next Vista Announces Finalists for Educational Video of the Year

My favorite educational video sharing site, Next Vista, has announced the finalists for their Videos of the Year. There are three Video of the Year categories; student creations, teacher creations, and collaborative creations (teachers and students producing together). One of the things that makes Next Vista outstanding is that all submitted and published videos teach some type of short lesson. All of the finalist videos exemplify that standard. One video from each category is embedded below. I encourage to watch the others as well. These videos offer great models for your own video creation projects.