Learning@Whitney: Developing a useful teaching tool 
Melanie Adsit, Whitney Museum of American Art, USA
Chuck Barger, Interactive Knowledge, Inc., USA
Dina Helal, Whitney Museum of American Art, USA
Jane Royal, Whitney Museum of American Art, USA
http://www.whitney.org/learning
Learning@Whitney is the Whitney Museum's educational resource for teachers, teens, and families. This Web site offers a framework to explore key works from the Whitney's collection of twentieth and twenty-first century American art, and a variety of tools through which to interact with and explore these images as primary resources for teaching and learning.
A key objective in developing this educational Web site was to provide strategies and tools that assist teachers in all subject areas to expand their use and integration of images in the classroom, and to make concrete connections between the Whitney's resources, current pedagogical directives, and the process by which they design curriculum. The creation of the Learning@Whitney site also afforded a unique opportunity to rethink the ways in which images might be incorporated as elements of learning and teaching experiences. The culmination of this inquiry process led to the design and development of an interactive tool called Collect Art. With this tool, site users create collections of Whitney images as well as complementary slide shows that can include text, sounds, Compare and Contrast pairings, and the ability to then share their work with others.
This mini-workshop will examine the development and integration of the Collect Art tool into the larger Learning@Whitney site design from a practical, pedagogical, and technical perspective. In addition to theoretical perspectives, examples of how teachers have successfully integrated their collections into specific classroom lessons and activities will be shown.
Mini-Workshop: Learning @ Whitney [Design]
Keywords: education, art, images, schools, teachers, collections
