myVirtualGallery    ::  Notes for teachers

Introduction and rationale

Two essential ingredients of learning are finding connections to personal experience, and active participation (doing rather than just hearing).

In an art museum:

• Finding connections includes:
  • imagining other-sensory (i.e. non-visual) equivalents for artworks (e.g. "If you could eat this painting, what would it taste like?")
  • exploring relationships between familiar and unfamiliar artworks
• Active participation includes:
  • discussion
  • role-play
  • art-making activities
  • creating mini-exhibitions (in which relationships between artworks can be explored)

Normally, creating a mini-exhibition requires photocopied 'artworks', scissors and glue. Now, with myVirtualGallery, your students can choose from over 10,000 artworks from the Art Gallery's collection and create their own virtual exhibitions right on their computers.

For students in years 11 and 12, myVirtualGallery can also be used to explore the role of the curator. See the pages What is a curator? and Interview with a curator.

Getting started

There are four basic types of exhibitions:

1. One artist
2. Subject (or subject-type)
3. Art period or movement
4. Idea-based

(See page More suggestions.) The first three should be suitable for students up to year 10. The last is particularly recommended for years 11 and 12.

Text panels

An essential ingredient of myVirtualGallery is the text panel. Each virtual exhibition must have at least one, on the title wall. However, it is important that they be used sensitively. Students should avoid turning their exhibitions into illustrated essays. Text should be written in short, easily digested chunks. A particularly effective technique is to give a piece of information and then pose a question. See Chaos as an example.

Logins and passwords

Unless it has been submitted to the website (see Making exhibitions public), a virtual exhibition can only be viewed by one person, using a login and password. To allow you, as teacher, to view your students' exhibitions, you have two alternatives:

(a) Each student gives you his/her login+password.
(b) You create one login+password and issue these to the class for each student to use.

The advantages of (a) are that each student can only edit his/her own exhibition, and the title wall of each exhibition automatically displays that student's name. The essential advantage of (b) is simplicity, at least with respect to logins.
 

Using myVirtualGallery for student assessment

If it's a requirement of your assignment that each student's exhibition has to be public, this can be a problem, for two reasons:

1. There can be a delay between an exhibition being submitted and being processed. (This is normally between a few hours to a few days. During that time, it cannot be modified.) However, if a number of exhibitions are submitted almost at the same time (as can easily happen for a school assignment), this delay can become significantly longer.
2. Exhibitions cannot be made public unless they meet a certain standard, with respect to:
   • Spelling and grammatical (although, if such errors are minor, they will often be fixed in the checking process)
   • Logic of expression (i.e. the sentences have to 'make sense')
   • Statements of fact
   • Relative scale of images (e.g. not making a small drawing look larger than a large painting)
   • Legal issues (mostly to do with potential defamation).
   Sometimes resolving these issues can involve an exchange of emails over a period of a week or so. Apart from the fact that this can be quite time-consuming, it could compromise the educational validity of your assessment process.

So, for using myVirtualGallery as an assessment tool, it is recommended that you either:
(a) tell your students not to submit their exhibitions (at least not until after the assessment process). Instead, each student would give you the URL of their exhibition, plus their login and password.
... OR ...
(b) request a special, temporary account that allows you to evaluate, and modify, exhibitions that are "pending approval" (i.e. have been submitted) and make them public.

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