Art & Music Tools
Art History
Khan Academy is all the rage because they house a humungous database of wonderful & FREE courses on a variety of subjects. The courses include readings, images, videos, and interactive activities. You can use parts of the courses for pre-teaching, teaching, re-teaching, and review. Check out their Art History Computer Animation, & AP Art History courses!
This website has an amazing timeline of art history. You can select an area of the world, then hone-in on a time period. Within that period, it will break down the period with key events, history, and obviously some art!
Can't make it out to The Met in New York with your students? No sweat! They can tour the MET and many other famous museums digitally! There are also many art pieces scanned in very high quality, so students can zoom in and see every brush stroke! Museums (with links) include: The Met, The MoMA, The British Museum, The Tate Britain, and even some locals like the Getty.
Besides museum tours, Google has many more free art resources available. They have an Art Movements section that includes high-quality art, background information, and stories about each of the movements. They also have an interesting Themes section, focused on a variety of artistic topics that would be perfect to incorporate into class. Lastly, check out the Mediums and Artists section for more ways to explore.
Smarthistory has loads of videos and informational texts on art history. It's like a multimedia textbook, all for free. There are also teacher resources, such as sample syllabi.
Art Creation
Want to teach students about 3D design? Tinkercad is the easiest platform to get students started. It comes with lots of tutorials, and it's all based on combining & subtracting basic shapes with/from each other.
Want to get fancy with 3D design? Autocad offers much more than Tinkercad. This site has much more detailed modeling software, along with fantastic, step-by-step tutorials. For free. Yay.
Lucidpress is a collaborative publishing & design tool with lots of options & templates. Basic accounts are free for teachers & students. It's a nice, free alternative to Adobe InDesign.
Another cool design tool, Canva allows you to create posters, banners, and more. I've used it personally to create school event posters, but students can use it to create all sorts of things with a ton of different available templates. It's free, unless you want to use the paid templates and images, which is completely unnecessary.
Looking for a free alternative to Photoshop? Use GIMP. It's not as attractive as Photoshop, but it does the job just fine. Note: you do need to install this software.
Looking for a free alternative to Photoshop that you don't have to install? Use Pixlr Editor. It's browser-based, which make work better for some schools. Also, students can use it on their personal devices without installing anything. Bad news: ads.
Music
If you've got Macs, there's no reason not to use Garage Band! It's free and loaded with options, whether you have instruments or not. Garage Band is best used for composition, but it now also has free beginning guitar & piano lessons!
This website provides lots of lessons that combine STEM with Music. After you choose a topic, you'll find various resources, such as lessons & worksheets. A few of the topics are: Indian Rhythms & Math, Groove Pizza, and Ecosonic Playgrounds.
Free but ugly audio editor. It gets the job done, but it's not pretty. It also requires quite a bit of teaching to understand how to use it. Note: you have to download and install this software to use it.
Noteflight and Flat are two other cool music composition websites, but they are pricey. If you've got the money, check them out. Noteflight & Flat do have a free limited accounts, which may be enough for some students, but teachers won't have any abilities to group or monitor students.