The Renaissance Connection - Allentown Art Museum
Lise Dubé, Allentown Art Museum, USA
Carl Schafer, Allentown Art Museum, USA
http://www.allentownartmuseum.org

Demonstration: Demonstrations - Session 2

Allentown Art Museum

The Renaissance Connection

www.renaissanceconnection.org

Introducing The Renaissance Connection! The Allentown Art Museum celebrates the launch of this web based project which started simply as an idea to integrate the middle school curricula with the Museum’s Samuel H. Kress collection of Renaissance art. Over the period of four years it evolved into a collaborative project that brought together the enthusiasm, ideas, and expertise of teachers, professors, museum educators, dedicated volunteers, and web specialists from throughout the Lehigh Valley and beyond to create the Museum’s first on-line educational initiative.

With a simple click of a mouse middle school teachers and their students can now travel 500 years into the past via an interactive educational website complete with digital images of artworks from the Kress collection, interactive activities, lesson plans, a time line, maps and more. Through the “Be a Patron” activity students can role-play the commissioning of an artwork while “Time Telescope” allows them to trace today’s innovations such as digital cameras back to their Renaissance roots. A stroll along the time line helps students explore six core themes of the Renaissance while their teachers can enhance the learning using the thirty-seven art works, thirteen lesson plans, and interactive maps. This light-hearted webs site puts a focus on integrated learning that would make Leonardo proud!

The Renaissance Connection is supported by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and The Ryder-Pool Foundation.