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ARTS Online Academy Offers Teachers Tools to Integrate Art with Technology SOMETIMES HOLLYWOOD HIGH SCHOOL TEACHER Shelley Hefler has a difficult time getting her students excited about studying art and art history. But fortunately for the veteran art teacher, the solution is literally one mouse click away at www.laep.org/artsonline. "This is a good resource to incorporate art with history, writing and literature," said Hefler during a week-long instructional workshop called ARTS Online Academy. "It really gives students a purpose on the Internet instead of them just surfing the Web." ARTS Online is a way of providing high school teachers with electronic access to art and related cultural materials for integration into their curriculum. With funding provided by the AT&T Foundation, Los Angeles Educational Partnership's Humanitas program is developing arts and other cultural material for dissemination via the Internet. A joint project of the Los Angeles Unified School District and LAEP, Humanitas is an interdisciplinary humanities instruction program for urban students at nearly 40 high schools in the LAUSD. The ARTS Online Academy provides teachers with training in the use of art-centered curricula. Humanitas teachers also receive hands-on technology training in the use of the Internet, email and various software to support use of this curricula and engage in extensive planning for how they will carry out this curricula in their classroom. They will also get a chance to design their own Web pages using state-of-the-art technology. "To have access to this type of information is wonderful," said Fran Nichols, an art teacher at University High School while exploring a Web site devoted to artist Pablo Picasso. "You not only get the art, but the history, biographical information and ways to link to related Web pages. I can see myself giving my students some Web page addresses and letting them explore." In addition, Humanitas teachers will participate in various workshops including one on integrating standards, curriculum and classroom assessment, presented by Neil Anstead, Humanitas academic director. "The concept of developing art-centered, inquiry-based curriculum follows from the premise that students can be more directly engaged by starting with the visual and eliciting questions about the material," said Humanitas Director Barbara Golding. "The development of critical thinking is more likely to be achieved through a habit of mind that poses questions and that stimulates their knowledge in reading and writing. Through inquiry, students learn to construct their own knowledge." With 30 high school teachers at seven schools participating, ARTS Online is developing and piloting several Web-based projects with several teacher teams currently developing thematic online curriculum under the guidance of Golding and Anstead.