A year ago, when I was hallucinating about having a cache of iPads to pass around my class, I responded to a grant initiative in my region for proposals involving a consortium of members from four universities in North Carolina’s Piedmont Triad Region.  The project “Apps4Art” was born (had to come up with a good reason for needing iPads didn’t we?) –and the quest embarked on was to download as many arts-related Apps as we could find on the market in 2011-2012–decide which were good, bad or ugly and develop a critique/jurying process that would evolve into a questionnaire for students–to help us compile statistics on Art Apps: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly.  The four people involved in this project were a Museum Curator, a Printmaker, an Actress/Creative Entrepreneur and an Art Historian.

With more and more educators –higher ed and K-12 bringing iPads into the classroom, there appeared to us to be  a need to have some sort of review/vetting system. We envisioned a kind of Rotten Tomatoes/Popcorn approach to compiling our data for Art related Apps.  We figured this out after spending too much money on worthless Apps.

Would be happy to share the results of our work—our rating system, our questionnaire etc.  Any other content-areas starting to be intentional about looking for quality and efficacy in Apps?  Our hands-down favorite, the Top of our Top Ten list of Arts-related Apps…The Museum of Modern Art’s Abstract Expressionism App.  (Moma AbEx Ipad App). (Free:)

Janet Seiz, Art Historian,

North Carolina A & T State University, Greensboro, NC