Educational websites

Barbara Piscitelli was asking me about useful websites for museum and gallery education.

Museums/galleries:

• SFMOMA online education resources
  
• Educator Resource Centre at the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum
  
• MOMA's Red Studio
  
• Ingenious at the Science Museum, London
  
• Walker Art Center – I just love them
  

Barbara – you'll see here I selected mostly gallery websites as I know that's your interest.

Online educational resources:

• Futurelab innovation in education – a good resource
  
• Their Space – eeducation for a digital generation – my favourite report on young people and the internet
  
• Larry Ferlazzo's websites of the day – a great resource mainly for ESL learning but widely applicable. This link is to his best of the best for 2007 but the whole blog is worth exploring
  
• TeacherTube – a place for teachers (and students) to upload and share videos and tips
  

I know this is only a taste – it's a huge web world out there, the trick is to subscribe to a few things rather than a lot. To that end, for those folks who don't already know – we have a large online network called Museum 3.0 with over 240 members. Feel free to sign up and continue these conversations – we're having a discussion about education on there right now! It's the one-stop shop for all things museum and gallery-related.

Research on museum websites developed for teachers

I received the following email from the VSG list:

"Jessica from Randi Korn & Associates is looking for fairly recent studies of museum Web sites developed for teachers. She is trying to comb the literature to get an idea of how teachers are using the Web, specifically museum Web sites."

Jessica, I did a detailed study in November 2005 to gain a better understanding of how emerging internet technologies are affecting the learning environment, with a specific focus on teachers and high-school students. The overall objective of the research project was to provide us with guidance on how to best develop a website that meets the needs of students and teachers in the primary and secondary levels across a range of curriculum areas. General objectives were to gain insights into how students and teachers are using the internet and what they are looking for when they access websites.

We conducted a series of five focus groups with students and teachers from a mix of public and private educational institutions. There were primary school teachers from years 5-6; secondary school teachers from years 7-10 (mainly science teachers and co-ordinators); students aged 13 to 16; and a group of teachers specialising in technology and computing. The aim of the discussion was to look at participants’ use of the internet, their knowledge of media, and their reaction to a range of websites.

Ahead of time, participants received a letter outlining the aims of the research and providing a list of websites to review. These museum, gallery and general sites had targeted materials for teachers and allowed a two-way exchange of information - these proved to be extremey useful as a way to seek general and specific feedback - here's the list of the sites we used. As well, participants brought along a list of the website ‘favourites’ they used for recreation and education, which again gave us useful insights into how they were using the web.

The paper from this study (Kelly and Breault, 2006) will be published in the proceedings of the 2006 ICOM-CECA conference this year. I'm happy to email this paper to anyone who wants it.

Also, I'd be interested to hear of others' experiences, BUT rather than email - which only reaches a select few - why not blog your responses for many to share??