Tate Britain
Perfect for younger students! A great student-friendly site, the Tate Britain’s ‘Tate Kids’ resource provides hands-on ways for budding young artists and art critics to explore the collection in innovative and interactive ways. With beautifully detailed graphics, the Tate Paint tool encourages students to create their own masterpiece and even animate them, before carefully choosing to ‘frame’ and ‘hang’ them in the online gallery.
Brilliant interactive games introduce children to the concepts behind famous art movements, from Cuboom (Cubism) to Wondermind (linking in to the recent exhibition on Alice in Wonderland). Meanwhile the site is carefully moderated to keep students completely safe online and even features a child-friendly online safety guide.
Guggenheim
The Guggenheim online collection features more than 800 artworks from the permanent collection, conveniently catalogued not only by artist, date and title, but also by artwork type and movement. These categories make it an ideal resource for students studying particular art movements, enabling them to see a wide range of different artists from the same period or school without having to track them down in different museums. The website also offers a ‘Daily Highlight’ and ‘Featured Recent Acquisition’ with a fascinating and extensive commentary; a great way for students to dip in and immerse themselves in a completely new piece of art at random.
The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA)
Students can explore one of the most famous galleries in the world without the prohibitive cost of a flight to New York, thanks to this great online collection. Works are catalogued by title and artist, with information provided about both the piece itself and the artist’s background. Perhaps the best feature is a convenient set of links provided alongside each piece, enabling students to click through to further information on the origins of the painting and other related works.
The Hermitage
One of the most impressive museums in the world, the Hermitage has a wealth of fabulous exhibits to excite and enthrall students, and they can experience them online thanks to its fantastic virtual tour. The tool uniquely enables visitors to experience panoramic views of the rooms in which the collections are stored, giving a vivid sense of actually visiting the museum itself. Fascinating descriptions explain the collections housed in each room, whilst individual masterpieces can be explored in greater detail.
The Uffizi
The virtual gallery of the famed Florentine museum boasts a particularly clear and simple layout, ideal for student navigation. Each room of the gallery is listed in turn and every painting housed in the museum can be viewed individually online.
Have you explored museums or art collections with your students online? Share your experiences and top sites with us below!
Images courtesy of Flickr. Feature image, martinak15. Second image, Bruce Berrien.