Bring Your Programs Into The 21st Century

Here's a few Web 2.0 tools that will help you bring your programs into the 21st century.

QR code generator - www.qrstuff.com/
QR code reader - www.i-nigma.mobi
Microsoft Tag generator - http://tag.microsoft.com/manageads.aspx
Tag reader - http://gettag.mobi
Foursqy=uare - http://foursquare.com/
History Pin - www.historypin.com
E Fieldtrips - www.efieldtrips.org/
Museum Box - http://museumbox.e2bn.org/
Omeka - www.omeka.org
Glogster - www.glogster.com
Dipity - http://new.dipity.com
Capzels - www.capzels.com
Timetoast - www.timetoast.com
Toondoo - www.toondoo.com
Zooburst - www.zooburst.com
Blurb - www.blurb.com
MagCloud - www.magcloud.com
Dvolover - www.dvolver.com
Photopeach - http://photopeach.com
Digital Storyteller - www.digitalstoryteller.org
Animoto - www.animoto.com
Skype - www.skype.com
Evite - http://new.evite.com
Wallwisher - www.wallwisher.com
Poll Everywhere - www.polleverywhere.com
Tweetbook - http://tweetbook.in
Map My Followers - www.mapmyfollowers.com

To Tweet or Not to Tweet?

There was a time when I thought Twitter was worthless; something best left to those who follow celebrity gossip. However, after starting my own experimental Twitter page (@SCMuseumNews), I began to see it as a useful tool with many different uses. That led me to ponder ways Twitter could be used to enhance museum education programs. Here are some of the ideas I came up with.

1. Tweet about what goes on behind the scenes. Museum visitors are a curious bunch that wants to know more about the things they never see.

2. Conduct a scavenger hunt of historic sites in your area. Tweet clues daily for sites to visit and photograph. Award prizes to the first to complete.

3. Recreate a "news" report of an historical event one tweet at a time to describe the event as it unfolds. This could be fictionalized or could use authentic headlines and reports.

4. Showcase artifacts or archival materials by posting descriptions along with links to images of the objects.

5. Start a Teen Tweet Club. Tweet a question related to a new exhibit, a mystery object, or an interesting person once a week to stimulate conversation. Continue to drive the conversation with periodic tweets.

6. Curate an online oral history exhibit by inviting a group of people such as Viet Nam war vets to tweet about their experience.

7. Create and maintain a diary that captures the daily life of a person who would have lived or worked at your house or farm museum - or use excerpts from a real journal.

Follow this link www.twitter.com/SCMuseumNews to see my Twitter of museum events happening in South Carolina.

Hearing History Through Music

Hearing is one of the primary senses we rely upon when processing information, so using sound, especially music, can be an effective tool for teaching history. Music is an excellent primary source that gives us an intimate peek into the emotions, lives, and experiences of past generations in an unique, and often very emotional, way. However, music is often overlooked in the museum as well as the traditional classroom.

Here are some easy ways to integrate music into your museum education programs:
- Play period-appropriate music in the background of a house museum
- Include music in pre-recorded self-guided tours
- Schedule a live performance with historical music and/or instruments
- Incorporate music listening stations into exhibits
- Plan a sing-a-long time in children’s programs
- Integrate pre-recorded music or sheet music into lesson plans or traveling trunks
- Utilize musicians for living history events
- Host a period-correct dance party

More Professional Development and this time it’s FREE!

Since we’re on the topic of professional development....
The Archaeology Program of the National Park Service in conjunction with the University of Maryland offers a series of distance learning courses designed to aid archaeologists, cultural resource managers, and museum staff members in the creation of interpretative programs and the care of archaeological collections. All of the self-paced courses are free and available to everyone. The courses may be found at National Park Service Archaeology Program Distance Learning.

Here are some of the courses available:
Managing Archeological Collections
Archeology for Interpreters
Interpretation for Archeologists
Study Tour of Archeological Interpretation
Assessment of Archeology Interpretation
Caring for Your Historic Building -- Online Education

Inexpensive Professional Development

When I became a museum educator, I had very little knowledge of what it took to be an “educator”. Let’s face it, most of us museum educators are skilled in history or art but few of us have extensive training in education. Some of us even ended up with this job by default because no one else in the museum wanted the extra headache of creating programs based on rigid state or national academic standards. Because I want to be a better educator, I am constantly seeking ways to educate myself. Therefore, I was excited when I recently learned of an online professional development program provided by PBS called TeacherLine. The site hosts a variety of 6-week courses geared to K-12 schoolteachers; however, there are a number of “Instructional Strategies” and “Technology” courses that may benefit museum educators as well. Courses generally cost about $199 and you may receive graduate-level course credit from accredited universities for an additional fee.

Some of the courses to check out are:
*Connecting Family, Community, and Schools
*Developing Understanding with Dynamic Media and Digital Storytelling
*Differentiated Instruction
*Using Assessment and Evaluation
*Mastering the Skills of Online Teaching
*Publishing on the Web

A Short Attention Span Is.....What Was I Saying?

How many times have you been on a tour and the guide rambles on and on and on and…..? You find yourself zoning out, no longer hearing a word the guide says, and you wonder to yourself, “Will anyone notice if I move on to something else?” All of us have been there and, for guests with very short attention spans, a guided tour can be sheer torture.

So how do you keep your guests from getting bored? One technique is to incorporate artifacts into your tour. Rather than pointing to artifacts in exhibits along the way, try sporadically passing around a couple of small objects from your education collection. For example, let guests handle a boll of cotton or tufts of wool while talking about spinning wheels and clothing production. Not only will these unexpected hands-on encounters delight and entertain your guests, but they will enhance the learning experience as well. When visitors are allowed to interact with and connect physically to artifacts, it is often easier for them to make connections between people, events, and places of the past. Holding the artifact somehow makes “history” seem more tangible and authentic.

KWL tours, OMG!

KWL charts (pronounced “cool”) are often used by schoolteachers to introduce topics and then to reinforce learned information. Museum educators can utilize this nifty technique to enhance tours and encourage interaction with guests.

When used in the classroom, KWL charts are comprised of 3 columns labeled K, W, and L. Prior to a lesson, students are asked to list what they “know” about the topic in the K column and what they “want” to find out in the W column. The L column is used to write down what they have “learned” once the lesson is over.

The same concept can be used when conducting tours by asking guests to consider what they know about the topic as your tour begins. Encourage guests to express what they want to know as the tour progresses. Wrap up the tour by engaging guests in discussion about things they learned by asking a few questions such as “How do you think they got the idea to …” or “Why do you think he didn’t…”

KWL is a quick and easy tool and its, well, cool! Your guests will think it’s cool to be involved in your tour and it’s even more cool to see what info they take away from the tour. :-)