Art teacher Sarah Edwards works in a school that does not actually have the space for a dedicated art room. Instead, at Fox primary in west London, art lessons take place in the classroom and materials such as paint, pencils, fabric and clay are brought in from a well-resourced art cupboard.
The corridors are lined with wonderful work , and the school has managed to achieve Artsmark Gold. But despite the strong emphasis on real paint and brushes, Edwards starts many lessons on the interactive whiteboard, using ActivPrimary to create flipcharts of images to inspire children and kick the lesson off. One of the challenges is finding time to source images for an effective presentation as "it can take hours to scan in images and sift through the internet."
A solution could be Jisc's curriculum-accredited Grove Art Online (from 1.04p per learner per year), a one-stop online resource for everything about art, from high-quality pictures to artists' biographies, contextual information and even lesson plans from MoMA, New York's Museum of Modern Art.
There may be no substitute for giving primary schoolchildren the tactile experience of mixing paint and getting mucky, but in secondary school one of the biggest challenges facing art teachers is getting pupils to be independent and make creative decisions on their own.
Dave Critchley, art teacher at Brentford school for girls, says he is all for accessible technology: "Many of these young people can create podcasts, build their own Facebook pages and edit films on their mobiles, so we need to tap into that knowledge that has left many adults far behind, and encourage young people's own creative voices." Critchley's A-level pupils have just completed a project based on photographs they took on their mobile phones.
While easy-to-use digital cameras that can quickly upload images to a computer are widely used in schools, other means of recording images for later use are just as important. A pen-shaped portable scanner such as the Docupen RC800 from Planon (£189.99) scans when rolled down almost any image: a doodle on a sheet of paper, a book illustration or even a pattern on a printed piece of fabric. It then saves it so that it can later be transferred to a computer. The accompanying software also translates handwritten notes into computer text - great for "writing up" notes from a field trip, or when you can't get to the scanner, which seems to happen often in a busy school.
With professional software packages such as Adobe Photoshop (education licence from £158.62) and InDesign (education licence from £186.82) now available to schools at a fraction of the real cost, young people can be well on their way to being familiar with industry-standard applications by the time they leave education. Concerns are widespread that pupils' creativity is being stifled in favour of being "taught to the test", reducing their ability to make their own decisions.
So providing software and hardware environments that encourage independent creativity and which allow them to express themselves "by any means necessary" are vital - this could include software such as Corel Painter X (£42.95) plus a Wacom drawing tablet (£38.95), for example, which provides an abundance of paints and brushes on screen.
This kind of set-up is very helpful, says GCSE art student Rudi Salmon."Marks are pressure-sensitive and feel real; colours are brilliant. The paint is ready to use instantly with no mess to clear up after. It's a mini artroom in itself."
Promethean (Bett stand B30): prometheanworld.com
Grove Art Online (J13): jcs.nen.gov.uk/catalogue/gao.html
Scanning Pens Limited (U92): scanningpens.co.uk
Adobe Systems UK (K40): adobe.com
Corel Painter X: corel.com
Wacom Bamboo drawing tablet: wacom.com
Studica (L35): studica.com