Google Cultural Institute

Google Cultural Institute

Google tips

Sunday Sit, Sip, and “Sync” ~ 11-23-2014

We promised to share from IETC (Illinois Education & Technology Conference), and this is another gem we picked up from one of our attendees. Natalie Young, an instructor from Northern Illinois University, sat with us all day in our “Google for Education” session, and approached us as we were packing up. She had a few questions, but most of all, Ms. Young wanted to ask us if we knew anything about the “Google Cultural Institute”. As she described it, we realized that this was new to us. Once again, it reinforced that we “don’t know what we don’t know.”

I started my teaching career as an art teacher, and Natalie had me with “galleries”. Google Cultural Institute has “partnered with hundreds of museums, cultural institutions, and archives to host the world’s cultural treasures online.” You can learn about this project on the “About Page” for the Google Cultural Institute. And of course, they have a channel on YouTube. We invite you to watch this video to see the powerful potential this project possesses to add dynamic “multimedia” to the lessons you bring to your students.

You can take your students on a virtual tour of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, or The Art Institute of Chicago.

Google Cultural Institute 2

Google Cultural Institute 1

Once you have signed into your Google account, you and your students can personalize your own gallery. Collections of relative resources, including videos, documents, art pieces, and artifacts, can be grouped to use with specific lessons, or your students can collect what they need for research projects.

Google Cultural Institute 3

One you have added “pieces” to your collection, you can add personal notes as captions, or a YouTube video.

Google Cultural Institute 5

So on this rainy day, take some time to visit the Google Cultural Institute and browse through the museums and galleries.

New York Metropolitan Museum of Art

[Tweet “Learn how to build personal collections with hundreds of rich cultural resources using Google Cultural Institute.”]

Wall Art

Photography tips

Sunday Sit, Sip, and “Sync” ~ 2-5-2012

Can I just say?

Bulletin Boards.

Yup.

I LOVED bulletin boards when I first began my career as a teacher.
Those were the days before ISATs, curriculum committees and objectives, district assessments…

I’ll stop there.

They were always “home-made” and often included the help of my students.

We planned them, we made them together, and they always reinforced what my students were learning.

Later, my teaching partner and I made bulletin boards that “worked together” to double the message we wished to deliver.

When we moved into our new school,
the bulletin boards were replaced with walls covered in fabric,
and the possibilities were endless.

Some teachers chose to COVER the walls with posters, banners, pictures, maps, graphs, diagrams, and whatever they felt was needed to reinforce their lessons.

Others preferred the “minimalist approach”.

This site might offer a compromise.
A huge poster could make a HUGE impact,
without hundreds of staples and thumbtacks to remove.

www.blockposters.com

Find a high-quality image, resize it to no more than 1 megabyte, and upload it.

Just follow their step-by-step instructions, and blockposters.com will generate a PDF document containing the pages of your poster. Each page has marks to match up with the other pages, and you will find it easy to piece together.

This might be just what you need to add a little “pizazz” to your classroom as you wait for spring…