Updated in 2025, the Art-o-matic 7.0 and Art-o-matic MINI are graphic organizer apps for teaching critical thinking about art. Based on the FTC Palette by Dr. Renee Sandell, both apps help organize a student’s thinking about art and helps build artistic language. Students will create annotations and analysis that can then be imported into workbooks, reports, essays or presentations.
Each app allows students to upload their choice of images, provides sentence starters and vocabulary help, and provides instant AI generated feedback on the student’s work allowing for timely editing. Both apps are free to use. Students will need to make a Poe.com account which is also free.
Updated with the new IB Visual Arts curriculum in mind, this app is suitable for use in all upper level courses where analyzing art is an important component.
With a user-friendly redesign, the MINI app is geared for middle school and grades 9-10. It is a great introduction to thinking and writing about art in an analytical way.
These videos are based on Dr. Renee Sandell’s Form, Theme, and Context™ approach. You can learn more about FTC on her website Visual Fitness 4 All – Engaging Creativity & Insight.
for advanced high school students
for beginning high school students
for middle school students
Providing timely feedback on a student’s written assignment, and the opportunity to revise their responses on that feedback is an essential component of developing critical and analytic thinking about art. Despite best efforts, by the time students receive that feedback from a teacher, the student’s thinking process about that question has been disrupted. Enter AI. Now each middle and high school project found on this site provides an optional assignment that uses AI to supply immediate feedback on a student’s written responses.
These two lessons are designed to help students learn about analyzing art and writing about it critically. Discovering Art helps students annotate artworks according to form, theme, and context to discover the meaning in artworks. Discovering More About Art helps students to synthesize their annotations about art into a true analysis. Both lessons have videos embedded which help explain the concepts. These resources are free to download. Click the images below to download these lessons.
These two lessons are designed to help students learn about talking and writing about art critically. Decoding Art helps students break down art into form. theme, and context to discover the meaning in an artwork. Building a Visual Arts Vocabulary helps students to expand the art vocabulary to describe and talk about art more effectively. Both lessons have videos embedded which help explain the concepts. These resources are free to download. Click the images below to download PDFs of these lessons.
For sixteen of his over thirty years in education, Brian Reverman taught high school and middle school art at the International School of Beijing, The American School of Bombay, and the Casablanca American School. He is currently the Artist-in-Residence at HKUGA College in Hong Kong.
© Brian Reverman 2019