Artists in all disciplines have traditionally used and combined technologies to create and express ideas. For today's artists both known and emerging technologies are altering the direction and escalating the pace of explorations within and between arts disciplines. This change results from the easy access to vast amounts of artistic media, materials, and processes and information about historical and contemporary artists. Technological advances that provide new media, material, products, and processes for creating, displaying, and communicating aesthetic ideas are available through worldwide information technologies, such as the Internet. Electronic technologies allow communication across miles and through satellite; and make possible explorations across time, in re-creations of the past and projections into the future.

New technologies also improve the artistic environment of schools. For example, technologies provide for safer ceramics firing procedures in ceramics classrooms, safer sound controls in music rooms, and more efficient lighting systems for stage performances.

Used appropriately, electronic technologies are magical. They extend the moment in any of the arts. For example, students performing a dance can view their performance on videotape and analyze the movement, position, and overall choreography and then create a library of improvisations or change the choreography, using a computerized dance notation program. These feedback and stop-action capabilities allow students to be inventive and take artistic risks with more confidence.

Change in teaching and learning is occurring rapidly for both teachers and students. Communities, schools, teachers, and students need to embrace new technologies as tools for the arts. Teachers are challenged to do new things with new equipment, not old things on new equipment. To adapt their knowledge, skills, and abilities, they need the opportunity to grow professionally. Allowcating time for professional development in new technology is an investment not only for the arts but for all subject areas because access to information has expanded beyond the static forms of books, paintings, or songs to universal access by computer and interactive forms of communication.

Teachers can use electronic technology to enhance their teaching of the four components of each arts discipline:

Artistic perception in the arts is heightened through the use of technological tools, such as digital cameras, theatrical lighting programs, computers, and MIDIs. Opportunities for recognizing, analyzing, and synthesizing the development of skills and for observing specific techniques are exciting and meaningful.

Creative expression using new technologies is unlimited. Students and teachers incorporate new electronic technologies into lessons, presentations, and exploration in each of the arts disciplines and us the technologies in connecting the arts with other subjects in the curriculum.

Historical and cultural context is brought vividly alive with interactive software programs and access to the worldwide electronic network, the Internet. For example, on a current laser disc program, a Beethoven symphony is accompanied by pictures of the composer, his friends, and his background; copies of his original musical score; information about the instruments for which the piece was written; and information about the events that inspired the work. Similar lasar discs, CD-ROM programs, and video libraries are available for dance, music, thearte, and the visual arts. Technology opens the classroom to arts of different times, places, and cultures.

Aesthetic valuing is supported by both old and new technologies, which offer a range of choices for students' reflection on and evaluation of the arts. From written reflection to multimedia presentations, the use of technology provides students at all levels with an opportunity to increase the depth and breadth of their understanding of the arts.

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