Every week, every month, and every year, the Smithsonian Institution and its various entities produce publications that appear online and in digital form. One could imagine that looking for each document separately would be quite time-consuming. Fortunately, the Smithsonian Research Online site allows visitors to look for such documents quickly and efficiently. On the left-hand side of the page,...

In 2002, the Tate Museum launched i-Map, an art resource designed to be accessible for visually impaired people. i-Map uses text, audio, and animation to help those who cannot see the artwork gain an understanding. This process also creates a resource that can be enjoyed by sighted users as well, particularly the narrated animations. The original version of i-Map focused on eight works by Picasso...

The tagline of Teaching Channel is "Great Teaching. Inspiring Classrooms." Educators from kindergarten to college will find hundreds of resources here, including fact sheets, lesson plans, videos, and blogs to help them in the classroom. First-time visitors will need to fill out a short free registration to get started. After this, users can click on left-hand side of the page to browse through...

Many people find doing origami relaxing, and others find it can be even a fine group activity to while away many pleasant hours. This particular website offers up some ways to use origami to teach mathematical thinking. Created by Daniel Meyer, Jeanine Meyer, and Aviva Meyer, this site includes a background essay on this art, a set of teaching strategies for incorporating origami into the...

Music appreciation can take many forms, and certainly gaining a basic understanding of how music is composed and subsequently analyzed and performed can provide years of enjoyment and edification. With his website, Teoria, Jose Rodriguez Alvira offers visitors the opportunity to take online tutorials, complete exercises, and read articles about music all in the same place. In the “Tutorials” area,...

What do you need to know to be an effective practicing architect? Quite a bit, of course, and the American Institute of Architects (AIA) has created this helpful set of resources to address the subject. On the homepage, visitors can look over upcoming professional development events, take advantage of seven thematic sections, and also read their helpful area on sustainable design titled "Walk the...

Teaching the arts is, as one might expect, an art in itself, and teachers young and old alike will find much to engage their attention on this delightful website. Created as part of the Annenberg Media's educational resource website, this site offers an eight-part professional development workshop for use by music, theater, dance, and visual art teachers. The site includes all eight of the one...

Many teachers would love to incorporate dance into their classrooms. But how? This valuable site from Annenberg Learner answers exactly this question. It features the methods of two very different educators, one from Brooklyn and the other from New Orleans, who have found various ways to integrate dance into their lesson plans. The site is clearly organized, with sections such as People and...

These lesson plans from the Metropolitan Museum of Art will take educators and their students into the heart of the collection of this world-renowned cultural institution. Here educators working with students between kindergarten and 12th grade will find lesson plans on such topics as Ancient Mesopotamia, Animal-Inspired Masks and Masquerades, Architecture and the Natural World, and many others....

Boston and Seattle have been working on new art museum buildings for several years, and the public and critical response to both structures has been quite positive. New York has a few well-regarded art museums of its own, and now it has one that is "new" in several senses of the word. Sitting cheek and jowl amidst the late-nineteenth century urban fabric of the Bowery, The New Museum of...