This past spring, Kim Hoffman & I were invited by the Memorial Art Gallery to lead a workshop on teaching with Omeka in high schools. In the months leading up to this workshop we racked our brains to come up with a sample collection of materials to use for the workshop. Ultimately we decided to use public art, for a number of reasons:
- Images and metadata were readily available
- public works of art are often transparent or quickly graspable
- the works are distributed throughout the Rochester area, and offer opportunities for the students to engage with their own neighborhoods.
In our workshop, we printed out approximately 40 images from the sample collection in Omeka, along with poetry written by local authors. Our students (the teachers) then selected 5-10 images and texts, and arranged them into a coherent story. We then showed them how to build their story using Omeka’s Exhibit Builder plugin.
You can view our Omeka site and access the lesson plan and teaching resources at public-art.dslab.digitalscholar.rochester.edu.