New Web TooYlsou Can Use
Craig Roland
are typically available for public
viewing, you can designate certain
images as private or viewable only
by friends or family. Fickr is easy to
use and has so many features and
add-ons that you’ll need some time
to explore them all.
Jumpcut
SchoolArts used Blogger.com to create its own blog.
Check it out at www.schoolarts.blogspot.com.
Avariety of online publish-
ing tools have emerged in
recent years that make it
easy for people who were
once simply consumers of Web con-
tent to become producers as well.
Using only a Web browser, you can
now post your opinions, edit and
publish photos and videos online,
organize and share your favorite
Web sites, contribute content to a
common resource site, and more.
If you’ve been wondering how you
might make better use of the Inter-
net in your art program, check out
the new Web tools listed below.
They may inspire you to try some-
thing new.
set up your own blog for free, using
Blogger (www.blogger.com). Sim-
ply go to the site, open an account,
and follow the instructions for get-
ting started.
Among the growing number of
video-sharing sites on the Web,
Jumpcut (www.jumpcut.com) is
perhaps the easiest to use. It gives
you all the tools you need to cre-
ate movies or slideshows from your
video clips or photos and publish
them online. You can even borrow
video clips from other members of
the Jumpcut community and remix
them into your own productions.
When you’re ready to publish your
movie, you can make it available for
public or private viewing.
Del.icio.us
Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking
tool that allows you to easily gather,
arrange, and share your favorite
links. One of the advantages of Del.
icio.us is that it lets you categorize
and save your links using keywords
(called “tags”). It also provides links
to the lists of other users who have
saved the same sites, which you can
browse and possibly find sites that
interest you. All of your links are
available to students and friends
from any computer connected to
the Internet. You can also keep a
private set of links that can only be
accessed with your username and
password.
PBwiki.com
Blogger.com
Blogging has become one of the
most popular forms of online com-
munication over the last couple of
years. For the art teacher, a blog
can be used to communicate with
parents and the school community,
post assignments for students with
Web links, provide virtual tours
of the art classroom, and share
lessons, teaching strategies, and
student artwork with other teach-
ers (Douglas, 2006). You can easily
A wiki is a collaborative Web space
where contributors can add content
or edit content that has already
been published on the site. While
wikis have many possible educa-
tional uses, some teachers have
begun using them to create class
resource sites that include course
syllabi, project sheets, and links for
their students to use. You can set up
your own password-protected wiki
site for free at PBwiki (pbwiki.com).
It’s easy to do and only takes a few
minutes.
Reference
Douglas, K. “The Art Blog:
Flickr
Your Place on the Internet.”
Fickr (flickr.com) is a photo-
sharing site that lets you upload
your photos to the Web, add com-
ments or descriptions, and tag them
so that you can easily find them
later on or create sets of photos with
similar tags. While photos on Flickr
SchoolArts (October 2006), p. 52.
Craig Roland is an associate professor of
art education in the School of Art and
art history at the University of Florida in
Gainesville. He is the author of The Art
Teacher’s Guide to the Internet (Davis
Publications, 2005). rolandc@ufl.edu
