Museums and You: Digital Images

Books with beautiful, full-color art reproductions can greatly increase your students’ exposure to masterpieces from around the word, but they can also put a serious dent in your budget. Continue to introduce your students to inspiring artworks both near and far by utilizing digital images from your favorite museums!

Museums share digital images of works from their collections because they want to provide greater access to them, regardless of an individual’s distance from the museum. As teachers, you are free to use these images in a variety of ways for educational purposes without contacting the images’ copyright holders, if any; you just can’t commercially profit off of any reproduced work without first clearing its rights and reproductions.

Museums often make digital images of their artworks available through collections they’ve categorized by media, place of origin, theme, artist, or other methods. Most museums will even let you use your own search terms to find artworks in their collections. Once you’ve found an image that you’d like to share with your students, you can use your mouse to right-click on the image and select either “copy image” for immediately pasting into another computer program or “save image” for placing in your electronic files for use for years to come.

There is an almost endless variety of ways that you can incorporate digital images into your curriculum. They can be projected digitally, curated into PowerPoint presentations by you or your students, printed onto overhead transparencies or paper, or even saved into online collections. You can find and research works ahead of time, or let your students use technology to explore online museum collections on their own. Museums have been working frantically to digitize their collections, so that you and your students can connect to them 24/7. Share your most successful ideas for incorporating digital images into your classroom activities by posting to the comments below.

 -Stacy Fuller