Online Artshow
One of my favorite events here at the ESD is the annual High School Art competition. Dozens of exciting and interesting artworks line our halls, including drawings, paintings, photographs, and sculptures. There are so many that every time I walk around the building, I see something that I hadn’t noticed before.
Now, thanks to digital photography and the web, the art can be viewed online. Point your browser at www.psesd.org/artshow/, and you can see what some of our region’s most creative students have done.
It’s actually fairly easy to create these kinds of web galleries. Adobe’s Photoshop Elements is probably the best software you can get for working with digital images, and has a very reasonable $42 education price. Creating web galleries is just one of the many things you can do with it. There are three steps to creating a gallery:
- Place all the images for your gallery into one directory or folder;
- Start Photoshop Elements and select “Create Web Photo Gallery” from under the file menu;
- Choose your options in the Web Gallery window (style, location of original images, location for completed gallery, etc.) and click OK.
The program does the rest for you, generating a set of html files that your web administrator can upload onto your school or district web page.
For the more ambitious of you, take a look at www.artsitenet.com/. This company sells two products, one of which is a custom server-based system for creating school art sites, with student galleries and portfolios. If you have an active arts program, it looks like it would be a great way to connect your student work with the outside community.