Picture This Story
	SNAPSHOT "Look what we wrote, Miss Wrenn! We were both looking at the same picture but our stories are so different! When will these stories get online so everybody can read them?" Miss Wrenn finished reading the e-mail message from Tom and smiled. Her experiment had worked! In the past, she had always included story writing in her unit on classical painters. Students would look at a famous painting and write a story about what they thought was going on in the picture (for example, Why is the Mona Lisa smiling? or What is going to happen next in Breezing Up?) This year, because there are computers and Internet connections in her classroom, she partnered with another art teacher and had two children respond to each painting. UNIT OF PRACTICE Invitation How do young students begin to make connections between story-telling and art? Given the same picture, what stories would students tell? This unit helps students become more observant and creative and gives them an opportunity to write for a wide audience. Situation This unit takes place in two separate classrooms connected by the Internet. Tasks Miss Wrenn begins the unit with online visits to a number of art galleries. Students explore the galleries and choose a picture to write about. They are challenged to look at the picture carefully and begin to imagine what is going on in the picture. What are the people doing and thinking? What will happen next? The teacher makes a list of the paintings that the children are working with and sends the list to her partner teacher. The partner students pick a painting from the list and write their own stories. After both classes write their first drafts, they get together online for peer editing using Aspects. The resulting stories are published as a Web site on the school's local area network along with digital images of the paintings that inspired the stories. Interactions Students work independently on their stories, and then partner with another student to peer edit their stories. Standards This unit responds to both art and language arts standards. Arts education standards call for programs that include understandings in art-making, history, and culture, and analysis in any arts-related project. Students should also have an informed acquaintance with exemplary works of art from a variety of cultures and historical periods, and a basic understanding of historical development in the arts disciplines, across the arts as a whole, and within cultures. The National Council of Teachers of English also have standards met by this unit including giving students the opportunity to write for a variety of audiences, to find information using a variety of technologies, and to publish their work in a variety of forms. Assessment Miss Wrenn evaluates students' work based on the degree to which they are able to tell the story of their chosen picture, their peer editing, and the finished story. Tools This unit uses the following tools: ¥ Computer equipped with browser software and an Internet connection ¥ DragNet; Aspects; and Myrmidon ¥ Electronic Teacher's Guide with active links to the Internet sites referred to in this Unit of Practice Getting Started If you are planning an activity like this one, you'll want to plan for the following: ¥ Student Research: Locate online art galleries using the links provided by Scholastic Network. These links can be dragged into a folder using DragNet so that students can access them easily. Copy the folder onto every computer being used for this project. Plan to allow students to explore the sites to choose a painting and show them how to copy and save the images. The "How To...Access Information" section of the Teacher's Guide provides you with strategies for distributing Internet information to students if you have limited computer resources. ¥ Finding a Partner: Setting up a collaborative activity means finding someone with whom to collaborate. The "How To...Communicate and Collaborate" section of this guide gives you suggestions on how to find partner classrooms as well as tips on how to prepare your students for working with an online partner. ¥ Online Peer Editing: Once you have a partner class, create a schedule for the peer editing activities and demonstrate the use of Aspects. The peer editing goes more smoothly if each student receives a draft of his or her partner's story prior to the online session. You can either send the drafts as e-mail or send them using HotLine as exchanged files. If you do not have a computer with online access for each student, your peer editing sessions will need to be scheduled with your partner teacher. The schedule for peer editing can be posted to the News area of HotLine. ¥ Publishing: Once students have finished their drafts, they prepare their stories for publishing using your favorite word processor. The text can then be converted to HTML format using Myrmidon. Suggestions for doing this are located in the "How To...Distribute Information" section of this guide. Contact the school's "Webmaster" for instructions on how to publish the stories and images on the school's local site. (Note: Unless you have the permission of the art gallery, you will not be allowed to publish copyrighted images on the Internet.) Internet Resources The Louvre This link takes you to the main menu for the Louvre's seven departments at http://www.paris.org/Musees/Louvre/collections.html. The Tokugawa Art Museum Text and photos combine during a tour of this Japanese museum featuring the collection of the Owari branch of the Tokugawa family at http://www.cjn.or.jp/tokugawa/index.html. The British Museum Images of the famous artifacts owned by the British Museum, from the Rosetta Stone to Parthenon sculptures to an Assyrian lioness carving, to name a few, are available here at http://www.british-museum.ac.uk/. The J. B. Speed Art Museum The home page includes the museum's history, map, program guide, and six galleries. Samples of exhibits from the museum's permanent collection include the African Gallery, the Ancient Art Gallery, the Contemporary Gallery, the European Gallery, the Kentucky Gallery, and the Native American Gallery can be found at http://www.speedmuseum.org/index.html. The Uffizi Gallery Many of the most important works of the Uffizi Gallery are on display at this Web site (artworks from the 14th to 17th centuries, from various schools). There are high resolution graphics, commentary, biographies, and a glossary of artistic movements and techniques at http://www.televisual.it/uffizi/.