'Painting' photo (c) 2011, Jim Pennucci - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Check out my New York Times post for English Language Learners on art — students complete an interactive about an artist who uses chewing gum for his creations, and I share teaching ideas using online art apps.

This list, The Best Art Websites For Learning English, is probably a little more arbitrary than my others. Here, not only are the rankings of which are best is pretty subjective, but the notion of what qualifies as art is, too.

Here are my choices:

Number six is the Language Guide Art Page. As in The Best Music Websites For Learning English, it’s pretty important for English Language Learners to learn basic art-related vocabulary.

I’ve just added CoSketch to both The Best Online Tools For Real-Time Collaboration and The Best Art Websites For Learning English.

It’s an easy way for English Language Learners and anyone else to collaboratively draw a picture.  There’s no real registration necessary, either.  You just go to the site, are given a private “virtual room” in which to begin drawing, and then you email the link to whoever else you want to participate.  While you’re drawing there’s also a text chat feature to communicate.  You can then save the image and either link to it or embed it in a student/teacher blog or website. You can also upload a photo for and discussing.

Draw.to looks like a simple online drawing application. It’s easy to draw and then your creation. Press the “c” on your keyboard to gain access to drawing in color.

Slimber is a very simple online drawing tool that requires no registration. Once you go to the website, you click on “painter” at the top, and you can begin creating. Once you’re finished, you can click “play” and it will “rerun” the artistic process you used. After clicking save, you can write a description of your image. Next, click on “gallery” where you can see your creation and get a url address or embed code.

Little Bird Tales lets you easily make slideshows where you can add text and, more importantly for English Language Learners, provide an audio narration. On nice touch is that you can virtually paint/draw artwork in addition to uploading images (unfortunately, the site doesn’t have the ability to grab photos off the web by url addresses). It’s free to use, but I’m unclear on if there will be an eventual cost to use the site. It appears to have an upper limit on the number of shows you can produce.

AWW (now called Miro) lets you draw with others or on your own, and does let you save the creation on the web. It doesn’t have a chatboard, however. You can read more about it at Richard Byrne’s blog.

Sketch Toy is a simple and useful online drawing tool. You can learn more about it at Richard Byrne’s blog.

Google’s Brand New “AutoDraw” Is Likely To Become A Favorite Place For Those Of Us Who Are Artistically-Challenged

Queeky is a free online drawing tool. I particularly like their MultiDraw feature, which lets you create private virtual rooms where users can collaborate in drawing.

Using “Quick, Draw!” With ELLs & Other Students

Draw.chat looks like a nice new collaborative drawing too. And it’s free.

Here’s how they describe it:

Draw.Chat is anonymous, online drawing board. You can create your paint chat in one click – without any registration. Every whiteboard has a unique, randomly generated URL which you can send to other people to start a real-time collaboration.

Get your personal chat room with the whiteboard where you can drop and paste Screenshots, Images and PDF’s. Use your camera to start a secure P2P video conference. You can also drag and drop images from your camera directly to the canvas. Use the bell for offline notification – when someone else open or write in the chat room. Draw.Chat delivers tools for annotating PDF’s, Maps, and Screenshots.

CREATE ART IN A UNIQUE WAY WITH “ARTBREEDER”

Pixilart looks like a cool online drawing tool.

Whiteborb is a super easy and accessible site where you can draw and share your creations.

Mondrian.fun lets you easily create abstract art.

Sumo Paint is a drawing tool.

Thisissand is a cool tool for creating online art work by sprinkling colored virtual “sand.”

Teaching English Through Using AI For Art Creation

Scribble Diffusion lets you draw an image, and then AI completes it with the help of your text prompt.

As always, I’m open to suggestions and critique.

These sites, and others, can also be found among the 8,000 categorized links on my website.

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