Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Kennedy Center's ARTSEDGE offers arts education resources for educators and families

ARTSEDGE is the online arts education by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Since the Kennedy Center’s opening in 1971, schoolchildren, parents and educators have turned to us as the nation’s premiere cultural resource.  Embracing this responsibility, the Kennedy Center instituted ARTSEDGE in 1996 as its educational media arm, reaching out to schools, communities, individuals and families with printed materials, classroom support and Internet technologies.

The full impact of ARTSEDGE might be measured by considering that of the eleven million people who participate in Kennedy Center Education Department programming each year, four million do it through ARTSEDGE resources.

The site is visited each day by more than can be held if every theater in the Kennedy Center complex was filled to capacity.

In an education landscape that is evolving with new ideas of how, when and where we teach, learn and create, the ARTSEDGE team has revisited every part of what— and how—we offer resources.

We are expanding our content to serve a new definition of educators, encompassing classroom and out-of-school teachers, with the single-minded goal to support arts-based student learning, whether in the classroom or an informal learning environment, like the home.
We’re focused on ways to support innovative teaching with the arts, and meet changing trends in education and to accommodate the ever-evolving impact of technology in our lives. Our collection of free digital resources—including lesson plans, audio stories, video clips, and interactive online modules—has been streamlined for easier browsing and upgraded to leverage best practices in educational media and multimedia-supported instruction.
“The redesign is a wonderful extension of the original ARTSEDGE mission, set over 15 years ago,” says Darrell M. Ayers, Vice President for Education at the Kennedy Center, “to connect people to people, to provide arts-centered learning experiences, and to lead the way in digitally-supported arts learning for all citizens.”

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