The World’s Largest Kids’ Art Museum

I hope by now you have heard of Artsonia.com.  If you haven’t, it is an online art gallery for student work.  They refer to it as…”the world’s largest kids’ art museum”.  Artsonia is also a partnered by the NAEA.  I have uploaded a great deal of student art work to this site over the past several years.  Artsonia is a great way to just highlight and share student art work, create on-line portfolios and encourage participation by family and friends of your students.  Students are listed by their first name followed by a number.  Student last names are never used online.

The first big steps are to add the class lists for all your students.  The following years you can just add the new students and/or grades you teach.  Artsonia allows you to move class lists up to the next grade very easily.  Scanning or photographing student work can become time consuming but enlisting parent/volunteer help can ease that quite a bit.  Students can enter statements about their work.  Students can also have “fan clubs” and visitors can leave comments for the artist (which parents have to approve before they are displayed online).  Family and friends and admirers can by items with student art work on them.  15% of each purchase goes to support your school’s art program – what a great way to enhance dwindling budgets.

Bob Reeker, and arts and technology teacher in Lincoln, Nebraska, used Artsonia to do a student art work exchange.  We both uploaded mood portraits to the site which our students could then view.  We designed a question sheet for the students to answer as they viewed the work.  We wanted to see how students in a different locale would respond to how other students created a mood/feeling in their work.  The responses were in turn sent through email.  Using Artsonia cut out the expense of send art work through snail mail there and back.  It also allowed the work to be viewed almost instantaneously.  We did have to make sure, however, that we had parent permission slips for all the students involved.  I think we did pretty well receiving about 98 % permission.

Please share how you may be using Artsonia in different and creative ways.  To view my artsonia gallery visit www.artsonia.com/schools/dodge1

-Thom Knab