Value of ARTstor in the K-12 community

ARTstor conducted a ten-month K-12 pilot with 11 different schools in 2005. You can read about our findings in the K-12 Pilot Summary.

During this pilot, and in our collaboration with participating K-12 schools in the years since, we gained insight into the value ARTstor offers to the K-12 community:

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Voices: testimony from K-12 users

Craig Farmer, Art History Instructor, Perpich Center for Arts Education, MN

"Last year, 32 students took the AP Art History exam and 8 students scored above the passing grade. This year, 35 students took the exam and 20 students scored above the passing grade (score of 3). Certainly I have continued to improve my curriculum for AP Art History, but I really feel that ARTstor contributed a great deal to the dramatic jump in test scores."

"ARTstor has opened up the world of the past to our art students. Not only do I design projects around this immense visual and scholarly library, but also students often spend their free time simply looking for discoveries.

Dana Hart-Stone, Chair, Visual Arts Department, Santa Catalina School, CA

ARTstor is the 'Where's Waldo' of the art history world and in a format that is so familiar to them that they have no problem navigating with the tools and finding what they didn't know existed. Having access to history with the ease of this technology has increased our student's understanding of the remarkable breadth and depth of human invention and, in turn, has increased the possibilities they envision for their own potential."

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Frequently asked questions by the K-12 community

Does ARTstor limit the content available for K-12 users or otherwise screen out content based on subject matter?

ARTstor does not evaluate content in the ARTstor Digital Library for age-specific appropriateness; we make the same content available to participating K-12 institutions located in the United States as we do to participating institutions of higher education, independent art schools, and museums located in the United States. During the 2004-2005 school year, ARTstor conducted a K-12 Pilot with 11 public and independent schools in the US to assess the value of the ARTstor Digital Library to the K-12 community and to develop an outreach plan. Based on the feedback we received from the Pilot participants, we concluded that the teachers and librarians at each K-12 school are best suited to determine what ARTstor content is appropriate for the students in their respective school.

If you are a teacher or librarian at a participating K-12 school, it is your responsibility to determine what content is appropriate for the students in your classroom and the amount of supervised access your students will have to the ARTstor Digital Library. ARTstor strongly encourages an open dialog among teachers, librarians, school administrators and parents to discuss what content is appropriate for their students and children. What may be suitable for high school AP Art History students may not be appropriate for 3rd grade students. Similarly, what one local community may consider appropriate for inclusion in primary school curriculum, another community may feel is only appropriate for more mature, secondary school students.

If you are a parent of a K-12 student and have questions about use of the ARTstor Digital Library in your child's curriculum, we encourage you to speak with your child's teacher.

Do students have to become "registered users" on the ARTstor web site to access and use ARTstor's collections?

A user does not need to become a registered user to have full access to the images in ARTstor. We do offer certain advanced software features that do require registration. To register, a user must provide an email address so that we can link the user with any saved image groups that the user creates.

If you are a teacher or librarian at a participating K-12 school and your students are under the age of 13, it is your responsibility to monitor your students' registration with ARTstor to ensure that they do not provide ARTstor with any personally identifiable information (please see questions below for further discussion on this topic).

Why are there different versions of the ARTstor Privacy Policy and the ARTstor Terms and Conditions of Use for K-12 institutions and their users than for other types of institutions?

ARTstor serves a wide range of audiences in the scholarly, educational, and cultural communities, including audiences of different age groups. K-12 institutions may wish to screen content that they feel may not be appropriate for their students, and so we have drafted documents that are specifically geared for the K-12 community. For students under the age of 13, it is the responsibility of teachers and librarians to monitor their students' use of the ARTstor Digital Library to ensure that the students do not provide ARTstor with any personally identifiable information (e.g., first name, last name, phone number) in compliance with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. In addition, it is each school's responsibility to ensure compliance with all other laws regulating children's use of the internet, regardless of age.

You may read the full ARTstor K-12 Privacy Policy and the ARTstor K-12 Terms and Conditions of Use.

As a teacher or librarian at a K-12 institution, what are my specific responsibilities for monitoring student use of the ARTstor Digital Library, particularly those students under 13 years of age?

Teachers and librarians at participating K-12 schools are responsible for monitoring how students access and use the ARTstor Digital Library and for complying with all laws regulating children's use of the internet. Certain federal, state, and local laws require that online service providers such as ARTstor do not collect personally identifiable information from children under the age of 13. Therefore, if you allow students under the age of 13 to have direct access to the ARTstor Digital Library in the classroom, library, or computer lab and you want them to take advantage of the advanced software features that require registration, it is your responsibility to ensure that the student does not provide an email address during the registration process that contains personally identifiable information (e.g., first name, last name, phone number).

Please inform your students that they must seek permission from a teacher or librarian before supplying an email address to ARTstor to become a registered user.

How can teachers use the ARTstor Digital Library in the K-12 classroom?

We invite you to review the K-12 Pilot Summary, which provides a description of how the Pilot participants used the ARTstor Digital Library in their classrooms. Please also see our section on Teaching with ARTstor.

Can K-12 teachers assign homework that requires students to access the ARTstor Digital Library from their home computers?

Students at participating K-12 schools may access the ARTstor Digital Library from their home computer, but only after becoming a registered user on the ARTstor website from a school classroom or library computer (please see above question on becoming a registered user). Once registered, the student may access the ARTstor Digital Library from a home computer. Please review our page on Remote access to ARTstor for more information. Please note that if a student is under the age of 13, a teacher or librarian must monitor the student's initial registration on the ARTstor website to ensure that the student does not provide us with any personally identifiable information (e.g., first name, last name, phone number) in compliance with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.

We strongly encourage parents to monitor their children's use of the ARTstor Digital Library at home. If you are a teacher assigning a student a registration for ARTstor use at home, you are responsible for ensuring that the child's parents are aware of the child's ability to access the Library, and that some content may not be appropriate for some age groups.

Will ARTstor collect personally identifiable information from K-12 Users?

In compliance with the Children''s Online Privacy Protection Act, ARTstor does not collect personally identifiable information from any users under the age of 13. Access to ARTstor content does not require registration or the collection of personally identifiable information by ARTstor, so users at participating K-12 institutions may access and use ARTstor with complete anonymity. To take advantage of certain advanced software features, a user must register with ARTstor. We require that teachers and librarians at participating K-12 schools monitor the use of the ARTstor Digital Library by those students that are under the age of 13 to ensure that students do not provide us with personally identifiable information (e.g., first name, last name, phone number) during the optional registration process.

We encourage you to review our ARTstor K-12 Privacy Policy for further details on the types of information we collect from users and how such information is utilized.

What types of user support and training are available for K-12 teachers and librarians?

For instructional handouts and Online Help to facilitate your use of ARTstor, please visit the Support & training section of this site. In addition, our User Services staff offers daily training sessions on all aspects of the ARTstor Digital Library. We offer these training sessions live and online.

Our User Services staff is also available to address any specific questions that you may have. You may email us userservices@artstor.org or call 888.278.0079 (USA only) or 212.500.2400.