Art Awareness via the Web

Art works by artists of African American ancestory came to Ellsworth School in Naperville recently via web links to the National Museum of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., thanks to the internet, the expertise of Dr. David J. Ritchie, Naperville (Illinois) School District 203's technology program and Ellsworth's Home and School Association fund raising efforts which purchased the necessary computing equipment.

Dr. Ritchie, a high energy physicist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, is one of the parent art appreciation volunteers at Ellsworth. Like the other Ellsworth Art "Mom's" and "Dad's", he conducts a monthly art appreciation lesson. In his case, it is for Lisa Feuerbach's fifth grade class and it is done with the help of the computer.

To quote Dr. Ritchie, "when I volunteered to be an 'Art Dad,' I decided I'd try to do the Art Awareness curriculum using the computer. What's neat about it is that after working for five years to help get technology into Ellsworth, we've now got sufficient equipment so that we can teach some really fun things that have nothing to do with technology-like art, for example. I'm really grateful to the taxpayers of this District and to the Home and School Association with all their fund-raising efforts for getting us to this point."

The opportunity to examine the art works from the museum in Washington, D.C. came to Ellsworth because of Dr. Ritchie's familiarity with the resources to be found on the Internet--at the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., the Louvre in Paris, France, and the University of California.

To develop the Art Appreciation sessions, Dr. Ritchie used his computer at home to prepare art appreciation lessons as a series of web pages and saved them to floppy disks. The web pages followed the general outline of the traditional, paper-based, art appreciation program.  Instead of showing posters of art works to demonstrate the concepts being discussed, links to images of art work residing on museum web servers were inserted in the web pages at the appropriate point. The web pages were transferred to the computer system in the Ellsworth classroom. Using a World Wide Web browser program and an LCD panel to project the computer monitor image onto a large screen, the Art Appreciation lessons were presented to the twenty-four fifth grade students.

Several of the fifth graders were asked in sequence to be the "driver"--to help present the lesson using the computer "mouse" to display the text and to select the pictures. "They don't realize it but they are learning the basic techniques of 'pointing, clicking, and dragging' with the computer mouse," said Dr. Ritchie. "No matter what the brand of computer, these are the ways of interacting with the it now. On into the twenty-first century, this will be the way we command many kinds of 'intelligent' machines."

Using these techniques, the "student driver" made new pictures appear, zoomed closer to examine detail, and brought up text information about the artists and their techniques for others in the class to study. In response to questions from Dr. Ritchie, the fifth graders discussed and defined terms such as abstract art, portrait, and landscape. They admired the realism and charged emotionalism of Edward Mitchell Banister's landscape "Approaching Storm." They enjoyed the economy of form and power of expression in Elizabeth Catlett's sculpture "Singing Head" and were intrigued by the stern expressions of Joshua Johnson's sea captain portrait painted during the early 1800's.

At the end of the one hour session, Dr. Ritchie gave the students a short quiz concerning what they'd learned about the art works studied and returned them to their more usual pursuits of "math minutes" and other important fundamentals of Mrs. Feuerbach's regular curriculum program.

"It's always exciting to me when we do a curriculum idea and they 'get it' as they did here. It's happened fairly often. Of course, the technology focuses their attention. I've not done a session yet where it's been a 'dud'. That's a credit to the quality of students and the serious learning atmosphere in the classroom," said Dr. Ritchie at the end of the presentation.

"Just this month, another two computers have arrived in the LRC, thanks to the proceeds from the Home and School holiday wrapping paper sales. It's wonderful. Mrs. Feuerbach and I are going to see if we can get out of the "adult active lecturer  / student passive watcher" mode. We can now put teams of four students each to a computer. It's still quite a few hands on a keyboard but this class can handle it if any can."

"We think they're ready to compose their own presentation since they've seen it done several times now. We're going to ask them to do one comparing the art pictures to photo's from the class's Outdoor Ed experience last fall. This should allow them to weave together art, English composition, compare and contrast analysis, computer keyboarding and mouse skills, photo scanning and presentation skills. Pretty good for fifth grade! I can hardly wait to hire them when they get out of school seven or so years from now!"

Postscript

The sessions described above took place on a once a month basis between November and February. At that point, we decided to move from a lecture-presentation format by the Art Awareness volunteer to a more "hands-on" approach.

We did three sessions in that mode of an hour each spaced a few weeks apart in April and May. Some twenty-four fifth graders were involved. Six Macs plus a Mac with a scanner attached were used.

The children were grouped into teams of four students each. They were given a disk with a prepared set of HTML files on it and a link to an art image (one of the one's that had been presented earlier). They were also given their choice of a color photo of their Fall "Outdoor Ed" trip. They were asked to work in teams to write a commentary comparing and contrasting the art image with the "Outdoor Ed" photo.

Lesson Plan

The lesson plan was as follows:

• Present task to children and form teams
• Give teams paper copy of template "html" document and let them choose a picture from "Outdoor Ed" photo's.
• Teams as ready move to scanner Mac where Art Awareness volunteer helps them scan photo using OmniPage software.
• Teams move to individual Mac and are helped to get up Mosaic and Teachtext (simultaneously) on Mac and are shown how to edit in Teachtext, save, and reload with Mosaic to see changes.
• Teams work on editing in group fashion.
• (End of first session; next occurred a month later)
• Teams do additional editing and scan additional pictures if desired in same situation.
• (End of second session; next occurred a few weeks later.)
• In Fifth Grade room, using an overhead projector Mac display, the teams each presented their works and commented upon it.

Curriculum Concepts Taught

Some of the curriculum concepts taught were:

• Team work - students were asked to work in teams. Modern day work situations are highly centered around collaborative team projects. Somewhat this is due to technology being so involved that each individual has talents and expertise to bring to the effort. Students brought similar differing talents and expertise to their team.
• Composition - students were asked to compose English text.
• Analysis - students were asked to compare and contrast two different non-textual elements and express what they found in words.
• Keyboarding - students were asked to enter text into a computer via a keyboard.
• Mousing - students were asked to use the computer mouse to point, click, and drag.
• Experiences with Lifelong Learning - students were asked to master new technology in rapid fashion by just jumping into the task and trying to accomplish something. This is very characteristic of the way that challenges that require learning later in life occurs.
• Goal setting and evaluation - students were asked prior to the second "hands-on" session to pick goals for themselves of things that they would like to accomplish and then asked after the session to evaluate their success in achieving the goals.

Lessons Learned from this Education and Technology Experience

Some of the lessons learned were:

• Four children per Mac are too many. Two per Mac would probably work a lot better.
• One person who knows computers is very touch and go. One needs to have two persons for something as intensive as what was done.
• The children seemed to learn a lot. Reports from evaluation sheets were very interesting and showed a range of realizations occurred.  For a student perspective, see Art Awareness Student Goals and Evaluation.

Back to:  April Pictures of the Art Awareness Unit

Back to:  David J. Ritchie - Volunteer