Small Changes; BIG RETURNS

I have just finished my first Wilkes course. It was about project-based learning and the Playing for Change people have created one of the most interesting collaborative projects I’ve come across. It’s also a great way to celebrate the end of a hefty learning experience. Please go to their website and either buy the CD or make a donation. One course down; ??!!@#?? to go. I’m onto Assessment next, have taken a peek at the Moodle, and it looks like a real bear.

Fab Find for the week: I was presenting at the VSS – Learning: Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere spring conference and came across these people among the displays. This looks so cool!

“The Virtual Museum of Canada celebrates the stories and treasures that have come to define Canada over the centuries. Here you will find innovative multimedia content that educates, inspires and fascinates! The VMC harnesses the power of the Internet to bring Canada's rich and diverse heritage into our homes, schools and places of work. This revolutionary medium allows for perspectives and interpretations that are both original and revealing.”

They have linked museums (historical and scientific) all over the country and made it possible to create and share lessons with archived material right on their site. You can also start a blog or a wiki. You enter through one of the 7 portals.

Let’s try the teachers’ workroom. It’s probably the least interesting looking place in the museum, but it offers some really neat capabilities. Remember when you used to create a lesson out of your own questions and bits from the newspaper or photocopied from other sources. You’d write a bit and then tape or glue stick a bit and write some more and then tape some more. When I was in a hurry, I’d use paperclips to hold the articles in place and whip the page over onto the photocopier and hope everything still lined up.

Well now you can do that all online with archived material from any museum in Canada. You can type in an introduction and embed an object (text, flash, whatever is available in the archives) and then type a question and embed another object and so forth until you have the entire lesson constructed and stored on their server. You can even add the specific objectives met at the bottom. The help desk is even open evenings, weekends and holidays!

Then I got to wondering if there were other great resources like this anywhere else and came across the Virtual Library Museum Pages with links to museums all over the world.

Finally I discovered this link is from a wiki for a course on using museum resources in teaching. If you click on the individual students, you can see their sample lessons, projects, and some of the ways they used Web 2.0 tools.

"The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of the young mind for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards."

(Anatole France)