Art Pictures on the World Wide Web

You may wish to use the Web to find more pictures or related material, or to research pictures to support work with themes other than Easter. These notes will help you...

Before you begin

These are some of the questions you might ask yourself:-

What do I hope the material will do for learning and teaching? What does it offer that cannot be gained from books or other sources?

The Internet's World Wide Web may offer material not available (or not readily available) elsewhere. Done well, using the Web can be an exciting and motivating experience for your students. It may be advantageous to have the material in computer readable form: it's much easier for students to incorporate pictures into desk-top published projects, for example.

What sort of relevant material is likely to be available on the Internet? How will I find the material? Will the pupils be able to find it, or should I find it and download it?

Direct links to the galleries used to research this site are provided below. There is a wide range of materials useful for teaching RE on the Web:- the best starting point is REonline, which includes a comprehensive index of useful resources. Pupils should always be given guidance in the form of clear and fairly tightly defined starting points when carrying out research on the Web.

If I don't feel very confident about IT, who can help me with the technical aspects? Are there any pupils who could find some of it for homework?

The technology is becoming progressively easier to use: if you have already mastered (for example) basic computer and word processing skills with help from INSET or local colleagues, you will find it quite easy to learn how to use the Web. Techno-literate pupils are often keen to help. In some schools, there will be a number of pupils whose Internet access facilities are better at home than at school!

How will I/the pupils store what we have found? Is there any distinctive way in which we could use material on-line?

The easiest way to get a copy of a Web page is to print it out. Web browser programs can save the component parts of a Web page (the text, a picture, a piece of music) to a disc as separate items. One of the most interesting things about the World Wide Web is that anyone can publish their own pages for the whole world to see. It is possible to devise projects which lead to students publishing their own work on (for example) the school's Web site.

How can what we are doing enhance the RE curriculum and fit in with IT skills development?

The additional skills needed to use a Web browser program do not take long to learn, and allow you to exploit one of the most useful aspects of the Internet. The key search skills you need to find information quickly are, in the main, the same skills that apply to searching for information in other forms. The World Wide Web has much to offer RE which is not readily available elsewhere.

Finding...


A selection of pictures on Easter themes has been incorporated into this Web site. In addition, each of the nine 'theme' pages provides a series of links to pictures of other relevant works of art, found in various Web galleries.

The galleries used in researching this site were:-

• The Web Gallery of Art
• The ImageBase
• Web Museum, Paris
• Galleria degli Uffizi
• National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

The first of these has been our preferred gallery, for reasons associated with the conditions of use. You can follow these links to explore for yourself. Some of these galleries offer links to other galleries: once you find one useful source it will often lead you to others. Most of the larger galleries have their own search facilities, so you can enter words such as 'last supper' and find all the relevant pictures. On some sites, you need to know who painted what...

If you still can't find what you want, try using a "search engine" (a Web site which indexes other Web sites' contents, and provides search facilities).

• The Web is very large - use search terms which will focus in on what you are looking for. Use several words, not just one.
  
  
• Searching for words like 'painting' or 'Easter' or 'Christian' or 'Festival' on their own are likely to produce extremely long lists which include many irrelevant pages.
  
  
• Using search terms like 'last supper painting' and 'garden gethsemane agony Christ' should produce better results.
  
  
• Remember... whatever you are looking for, using other people's pre-researched lists is quicker than creating your own from scratch!

Storing...

If you want to keep track of what you've found, use bookmarks / favourites / hotlists. (Unfortunately, although web browsers have a facility for storing and grouping pointers to web pages so that you can return to them 'with one mouse click', different browsers have different names for it.)

Material can also be saved from web pages directly onto the computer's hard disk. (Pointing at a picture and clicking the opposite/menu mouse button will, in many browser programs, give you an option to save the picture.) You can print images either from the web or from your hard disk.

When adding bookmarks to your list, check the title of the page you are bookmarking. Some pages have meaningful titles, and others don't. It's a good idea to learn how to edit your bookmarks file, so you can give your bookmarks meaningful and memorable titles.


Using...

There are all sorts of ways to use the material, including:

• Printing copies of the pictures for use off-line.
• Recalling previously stored images from hard disc, for closer examination and discussion round the computer by an individual or in pairs or small groups.
• Working 'live' on the Web, using bookmarks, perhaps gathered into suitably-named folders for a compare and contrast exercise.

The Web is a dynamic medium, and sometimes Web sites move location, change dramatically, or (occasionally) disappear altogether. So it's a good idea to have a selection of bookmarks for any given topic, rather than depending on just one.

© Culham College Institute 1998