Washington -- American museums offer a wealth
of online exhibitions, podcasts and other educational material
that represent learning opportunities for teachers and students
around the world.
There are approximately 17,000 museums in
the United States, and “most museums of any size now
have a Web presence,” according to Jason Hall, the
director of government and media relations at the American
Association of Museums (AAM) in Washington. In addition,
many libraries and other institutions have made some of
the collections they hold partially or entirely available
online. The Internet has become the “principal way
of reaching those who can’t physically come,”
Hall told the Washington File.
The result is a bonanza for teachers looking
for interesting new lesson plans or for students searching
for material on a specific topic. Search pages specifically
designed for teachers improve access to the materials, as
do thematically arranged teaching resources from the Smithsonian
Institution, the world’s largest museum complex. (See
related
article.)
The Smithsonian Global Sound provides Internet
access to more than 40,000 recordings available for downloading,
most for 99 cents. Selections include blues, bluegrass,
cowboy songs, the Afghan Rubab, French chansons, Jamaican
calypsos, Sicilian tarantellas, Chinese opera and Tajik
and Uzbek music. The catalogue of selections can be searched
by genre, instrument, artist name or song title, as well
as by continent, country or region of origin.
Although there is no simple way to look
comprehensively at available educational resources, there
are some easy ways to find the best.
Fifty U.S. organizations and agencies ranging
from the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation to the
White House have tried to make educational materials easier
to find by participating in the Federal Resources for Educational
Excellence Web site (FREE). It includes teaching ideas,
learning activities, photographs, maps, primary documents,
statistics, paintings, sound recordings and podcasts on
thousands of topics. It is particularly useful because it
includes a great deal of educational material from agencies
of the federal government and museums and has an archive
dating back to 1998. (See the list
of resources on the FREE Web site.)
Science.gov is a gateway to reliable information
about science from across the federal government, including
museums. Created by a partnership of 10 major U.S. government
science agencies, it offers resources for teachers and students
in scientific or technical fields.
Finding the most useful online educational
materials offered by the thousands of private museums and
libraries is more difficult, but special subject pages can
streamline the process. The U.S.
Embassy in Berlin, for example, has a comprehensive
page of resources on the American Indian.
SPECIAL PAGES FOR TEACHERS AND STUDENTS
American museums are trying to help teachers
and students by providing special pages that organize online
exhibitions or make their collections more accessible to
educators. Many also are providing free lesson plans or
teaching modules that use materials in their collections.
New York’s Guggenheim Museum, for
example, provides a variety of curriculum materials for
teachers based on such recent exhibitions as Russia and
The Aztec Empire. It aims to develop a comprehensive range
of lessons for educators on art and artists in the museum’s
collection. (For additional information, see Arts
Curriculum Online on the museum’s Web site.)
The Library of Congress has a special page
offering a “teacher’s eye view” to more
than 7 million historical documents, photographs, maps,
films and audio recordings, with lesson plans and activities
designed for use with the collections for various grade
levels. For example, “Interviews with Today’s
Immigrants” offers immigration stories illustrating
the American immigration experience during the second half
of the 20th century and the early years of the 21st century.
(See the Learning
Page on the Library of Congress Web site.)
The Smithsonian Institution’s In Your
Classroom program recently released a three-lesson teaching
module, The Music in Poetry, the latest in a series. The
module introduces students to the rhythms of poetry by focusing
on the ballad stanza and the blues stanzas of Harlem Renaissance
poet Langston Hughes. A sound track for the module available
on the Smithsonian Web site includes early recordings by
Bob Dylan and Suzanne Vega.
Hall says that the most rapid growth in
the museum field is in children’s museums and science
and technology museums. “These museums typically do
not collect unique objects but instead focus on education,”
he said, and they try to educate by presenting processes.
An excellent example is the Brooklyn Children's
Museum -- winner of a silver medal in the AAM’s 2005
MUSE Awards for its Collection Central Online, which eventually
will include access to virtually all of the museum's collection
of 30,000 cultural artifacts and science specimens. (See
Collection
Central Online on the museum’s Web site.) The
AAM’s Media and Technology Committee sponsors the
annual MUSE Awards, which recognize outstanding achievement
and effectiveness in museum media.
“What fun it is, and how easy it is,
to find an object, maybe even hear the sound it makes, zoom
in and around it, and even make your own inspired drawing
for submission to a public online collection,” the
MUSE judges said. “The ease with which relationships
among objects can be explored will really get kids discovering,
thinking and learning.”
For additional information about resources
available on the Smithsonian Web site, see:
• Heritage
Teaching resources,
• Smithsonian
Global Sound, and
• The
Music in Poetry.
Jeffrey Thomas
Washington File Staff Writer
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