Where does the budget concious art teacher go to expose her students to centuries of great art? Well, there’s a lot of places, but one of the websites to start at would be the Web Gallery of Art. The museum claims to have the digitized works of most major painters (and a lot of minor ones) from about 1100-1850. I don’t know if the claim is true, but there is an awful lot of images there to study and learn from. This could prove to be a very useful resource if you’re looking at the history of art.

Honestly, I’m not completely sure what you’d do with these pictures, but they were so cool I had to include them.

The painting on this website are some of the really neat “artist conceptions” that NASA used when promoting its various space missions. This would be useful in an art class for the technique, a science class for looking at how the conceptions of space have lived up to the reality, or to a history class as visuals when looking at how humankind looked at the world and beyond in the late 20th Century.

These are really neat painting and can be used in class guilt free since they have been placed in the public domain. You can copy these for your students to use without guilt or fear of breaking copyright.

There’s a lot of cool things about art and perspective and such, but it can be tough to get some students interested in studying how that all. Escher’s perspective distorting drawings help draw the attention of the unmotivated students, but what do you do for kids whose attention can’t even be captured that way?

Well, would you believe that you can do Escher drawings with Lego? The Lego work simulates Relativity, Ascending and Descending, Balcony, Belvedere, and Waterfall. It’s amazing how even Lego can be built to mess with your senses.

This is actually a very cool little tool. If you’ve ever read books and wondered where the places in them were, Google Books has added a feature where they’re beginning to map many of the locations mentioned in Google Maps.

The blog article where this is mentioned lists only 8 books that Google has mapped. Even so, this is a cool little tool to help you understand the books you’re reading, and it should grow into something very useful.

If you don’t believe it, check out their map from The Travels of Marco Polo.

There are really good sites and not such good ones. Qwerty Warriors is a great little site. This one by JPhantom is not so strong. 

The site isn’t pretty. It doesn’t have fancy graphics and it doesn’t do any dancing or singing. Yet despite its very Plain Jane appearance, it is useful. This site expects you to type and to type accurately. If you’re trying to get your students to develop a typing rhythm (and so not correct their errors) ignore this site. However, if you’re trying to train your students to correct their mistakes, this site will definitely help. If you fail to complete the errors, the test just doesn’t finish.

It seems to give you a pretty good workout, and it assumes you already know all the keys. The site is a pretty good tool, but it’s not for beginning typists.