After a week of diving into digital art history, I now have a number of new tools under my belt that will be extremely beneficial to my teaching and to student learning. Last week we were introduced to Storymaps, along with a number of other mapping tools that could be useful in my teaching and research. While I will undoubtedly use a number of the mapping tools for my mural project, Storymaps seems like a relatively simple and effective way to have students map public art walks in the city or the provenance/transit of works of art. I have asked students to do these things in previous classes, but could never find a tool that would be easy enough to demonstrate, yet dynamic enough to fully engage them. Storymaps is well-suited to the goals of the assignments I have designed. More importantly, the learning curve is shallow enough that students will be able to gain competency in using SM without sacrificing content, which has sometimes been the case when I have tried to use platforms or tools in which the learning curve is too steep.

Here’s an example based on my grandmother’s life (I needed a break from murals!):

Source: Storymaps