Resource: Heilbrunn Timeline of the History of Art

Another post in a series of great online resources for paperless teachers as well as any teacher who wants to bring an online element into her or his classroom:

The Heilbrunn Timeline of the History of Art, hosted by the Met, is the single best resource for art history students that I have found online. While there are individual sites dedicated to individual exhibitions or artists that are better in their own ways than the Heilbrunn Timeline, there is no single resource that covers the breadth of World Art History better.

Holding Western and Eastern traditions in equal measure, the Timeline allows students to research by era, region, artifact-type/art-style, in a completely hyperlinked environment supported by scholarly papers both accessible to the novice as well as useful to seasoned teachers.

I would advise using the Thematic Essays as examples of exemplary writing, as writing about art is often quite a new challenge for students who otherwise rarely are asked to write critically about things they 'see'.

The Timeline is an excellent resource for Fine Arts and History teachers alike. There's also plenty of room to use the resources -- especially the interactive world maps -- in a foreign language classroom.