Integrating the arts into the curriculum yields many benefits for students, from building social and emotional skills to developing creative talents and fostering cultural awareness. Incorporating art and music on a regular basis brought joy and fun to my classroom, created opportunities for self-expression and allowed different students to shine.

And yet, the arts are often treated as something extra. Art and music education is often the first to be cut or sidelined when budgets get squeezed or administrators come under pressure to raise test scores.

While technology tools cannot and should not replace the hands-on making of art, they can be used to bring the arts, which may be otherwise lacking in your students’ school day, into your curriculum in meaningful ways.

Google Arts & Culture is an online collection of all things art, including self-paced learning modules, close-ups of paintings, tours of museums around the world and art treasure hunts, as well as interactive applications like digital coloring books of famous paintings and designing your own art gallery. This site helped me prepare my students for a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which made our in-person experience that much more enriching.

Drawing with Mr. J helps students in grades K–5 learn social and emotional skills through quick and easy drawing demonstrations based on simple shapes. Every video comes with a companion guide with activities and resources. These drawings can be worked into lesson plans, used as morning warm-ups, or used as a check-in after lunch or during transition times.

Paint and Play from the National Gallery of Art allows students to create a design in the style of a famous artist from the museum’s collection or go freehand using its digital brushes and color palettes. Students can upload their own images into their design and then enhance them with the site’s online tools. A rooster avatar shares facts about artists and inspirational sayings to spur creativity.

Chrome Music Lab brings music together with science, math and other core academic subjects through its interactive apps called “experiments.” Students can create musical compositions based on molecule movements, graphs and grids, sound patterns and frequencies, the color wheel, spectrograms and even draw brushstrokes in the style of painter Wassily Kandinsky.

Groove Pizza is an interactive percussion app for creative music-making designed at New York University using math concepts such as shapes, angles and patterns. The app has a friendly interface that New York City kids know well: a pizza pie. Start with one of the pizza “specials” and add or remove “toppings” to adjust the groove, or go to the “shapes” tab and drag various forms onto the pie plate to create and play math-inspired grooves.

Perfect Pitch from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts uses a baseball analogy to introduce students to orchestral instruments and musical eras. Students can choose their “lineup” of instruments and create their own musical mix. Then they can take a fun, interactive quiz to identify instrument sounds and answer musical trivia.