There are several museums that allow you to virtually look at their art and then students can pick and choose which paintings or art objects they like.  On some of the sites students can just email their collections to their teacher who can then post them online.  Students can also post the url’s on their own blog or online journal and explain why they picked the art they included.   On some of the sites students are not given direct url’s and, instead, have to register to access “their” collections.  In those situations, I just create one account I use for the whole class, and they make individual collections within that account.

I’d suggest teacher’s do a “practice run” on these sites first, though, since sometimes the museums’ email functions haven’t worked real well (or my email provider marks it as really bad spam and doesn’t allow it through) and the student collections disappear into the bowels of the Web.  In fact, it’s probably a good idea for teachers to do that on all the links on my Examples of Student Work page (where these museum links are also located).

One link I just posted is to the Whitney Museum.   An excellent one is to the Virtual Musem of Canada, which allows students to comment on their objects within the collection.  You do the same at the Art Explorer Scrapbook at the Art Museum of Chicago.

The Tate in Britain clearly has the easiest and best one of these sites.  I’ve, on occasion, though, have had problems with receiving student collections via email from their site.  That’s why doing a teacher practice run is important.

The Seattle Art Museum is the other link I have in this category.  All of them can be found under Student Art Collections.