Pictures are the content of the subject and at the same time the most important medium in art lessons. Which pictures you want to use in class is not just a didactic decision: When using picture material for which you are not the author, some legal things have to be observed.
Pictures – analog or digital?
Images can be used analog or digital in the classroom – both have advantages and disadvantages.
Pictures in textbooks
Images can of course be found in the textbooks of the various school book publishers.
If the school treats itself to one class set of these or other textbooks and the corresponding additional material, the pictures are of course available for every student.
Image collections: masterpieces of art
Art portfolios offer high-quality reproductions on single sheets that can be used very flexibly in lessons.
Advantages of image collections
The advantages of the printed image material are literally obvious: every student can have the image right in front of their nose and, especially in times of advancing digitization, the haptic should be taken into account, not least as an encouragement to slowness, which can encourage closer inspection. Everyone can look for himself in peace, pictures as single sheets can be arranged next to each other and thus brought into context. The image presentation on the projector, however, requires more frontal teaching situations and a darkening of the room.
The disadvantage of image collections
The disadvantage of the collections of images: You are limited to a – more or less rigid – selection that is given from outside. The selection also primarily refers to image examples from art and leaves out every day such as cleaning service providersĀ or media images.
Digital images from the Internet
If the art space is equipped with a computer, projector, projection surface, and Internet access, you will soon no longer want to be without the option of spontaneous online image searches. In lessons that cannot be planned down to the last detail, you can spontaneously search for sample images to clarify a situation or to give suggestions. Interactive whiteboards also allow you to mark and draw on the image, for example, to clarify composition lines.