Ready to explore new tools you can use to engage students in the classroom? Then you will want to investigate Google Arts and Culture. It has a lot to offer, including a teacher’s guide.
What Is Google Arts and Culture?
Some people fall asleep on museum trips and sleepwalk through art galleries. If you’re like me, you have to push yourself to stay interested. My approach is to pick one aspect of a museum trip or piece of artwork and then dig into the history of that single component, learning more about it. Google Arts and Culture allows you to do just this. They’ve partnered with over 2,000 museums and archives to provide digital access to view and explore art in both physical and contextual ways.
Learning with Google Arts and Culture
A collaborative and communal approach to arts and culture emphasizes reliance on collective wisdom inherent in eighty percent of world cultures represented in classrooms. It also suggests that group members take care of each other to get ahead. Games, songs, poetry also tap into collective culture. Google’s Art and Culture approaches this by offering art selfies and puzzle parties.
Some more areas of learning possibility include:
- Virtual Field Trips, such as the Moon, Great Barrier Reef, and visits to museums.
- Lesson plans for a variety of areas, such as Egypt, Milestones in the Pride Movement.
- Inventions and discoveries in history.
- Creating melodies with artificial intelligence.
- Art coloring books.
- Collaborative puzzle parties.
For me, the most fun aspect of Google Arts and Culture is the experiments page. You’ll find a lot of hands-on activities to interact with.
There is a lot more, such as a focus on Black History and Culture in the United States, as well as Brazil and Britain. Other gems from Google Art and Culture include:
- Grafica America
- Women Campaigning for Equality and Change
- Community and Cultural Identity
- National Identity lesson plans (example below):
The most powerful image is that of S Fernandez featured at the top of this blog entry. It addresses “the cruel practice of separating children from their parents in unlawful detention.” Images and lessons like these offer up quite a bit for discussion.
The Teacher’s Guide
This 52-page guide provides a roadmap to the extensive content in Arts and Culture. It suggests that you will be able to integrate Google Arts and Culture into the curriculum. The goal of the guide is to give students the following:
- Deeper context
- Engaging, hands-on learning opportunities.
You can find a wide variety of student activities linked on page forty of the guide. The guide outlines several ways to get started, such as:
- Downloadable lessons. These offer a self-guided learning structure for the content available.
- Applied digital skills. This provides free, video-based lessons that guide students step by step. The goal is to complete a digital project using Google Arts & Culture content.
- Customizable activities. These activities support students with critical thinking and digital literacy skills. They use these skills as they explore the content and features available.
- The Guardian Guide. Assists families and guardians in getting familiar with the site and app.
There’s a lot to like about Google Arts and Culture. You could spend a few hours, lost exploring a wide variety of topics. One thing you won’t do? Fall asleep. Google Arts and Culture has done a wonderful job making engaging content.
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