by: Rachel Cummings with Kate Harris
TpT Store: Creative Instruction
If you haven’t visited the Smithsonian Museums lately, they are worth a
trip. Not a trip in your car, or by plane, but a trip online, to the
voluminous online resources available to teachers and students.
Smithsonian Education features a slew, yes, a slew, of resources. There
are lesson plans for language arts, history and culture, art and design, and science and technology. You can download activity sheets
for everything from pop-culture and traveling in the United States to
the Apollo 11 mission to the moon or giant squid. Have students complete
an interactive exploration of a topic—Rationing during WW1, Prehistoric
Climate Change, an Overview of the Presidents…—at the IdeaLab.
But, head’s up, Smithsonian Education is being replaced by a new site
and a new approach to online education called the Smithsonian Institute
Learning Lab.
The Learning Lab, which debuted in October, will become the mothership for the Smithsonian Institute’s online education resources, eventually replacing many of the existing Smithsonian websites. It offers users the breadth of the Smithsonian collection, and the ability to customize collections and add content of their own. For example, you can create unique collections from the Smithsonian holdings, upload documents, and attach notes and questions to an image.
Let’s see how.
To start, Sign Up on the homepage for an account. Having an account is necessary to create your own collections, and free. Log-in and then use the search bar in the upper left to search for Smithsonian holdings on the topic that interests you. Let’s try ‘revolution’ as an example. 2,190 resources match that search term. When you find one that you’d like to add to a collection, hover over it. Three icons appear. Click on the pages icon on the far right. Then, create a new collection (or, later, add to an existing collection.) When you have more collections, be sure to select which collection to add a piece to and be sure to click the ‘Add’ button in the upper right corner.
You can do cool things once you have a collection. Click on the sunburst in the upper right corner and choose Collections, then click on a collection to discover the possibilities. Use the rocket icon to make your collection public on the Smithsonian site. Create an assignment (file icon) to accompany a collection. Click on the pencil to open the editing tool; click the + icon in the left margin to add notes or design quiz questions for each image from a drop-down menu.
You can also peruse others’ collections. If you want to see what’s out there, don’t put anything in the search box on the homepage, but hit the enter key. It pulls up over a million resources. Narrow this down by selecting the Learning Lab tab on the left, under the search box. Now you can scroll through the 145 public Learning Lab collections. Hover over each to see the title and the creator. If you find one you like, click on it to open it. If you want to edit it, use the icons in the upper right corner to copy the collection. This adds the collection to your own collection and you can now edit and add to it as you like. Cool, huh? And useful. Thanks to the Smithsonian Learning Lab, you can now take your students on a customized tour of all that our nation’s greatest museum has to offer.
If you like this idea, you might also like:
The Learning Lab, which debuted in October, will become the mothership for the Smithsonian Institute’s online education resources, eventually replacing many of the existing Smithsonian websites. It offers users the breadth of the Smithsonian collection, and the ability to customize collections and add content of their own. For example, you can create unique collections from the Smithsonian holdings, upload documents, and attach notes and questions to an image.
Let’s see how.
To start, Sign Up on the homepage for an account. Having an account is necessary to create your own collections, and free. Log-in and then use the search bar in the upper left to search for Smithsonian holdings on the topic that interests you. Let’s try ‘revolution’ as an example. 2,190 resources match that search term. When you find one that you’d like to add to a collection, hover over it. Three icons appear. Click on the pages icon on the far right. Then, create a new collection (or, later, add to an existing collection.) When you have more collections, be sure to select which collection to add a piece to and be sure to click the ‘Add’ button in the upper right corner.
You can do cool things once you have a collection. Click on the sunburst in the upper right corner and choose Collections, then click on a collection to discover the possibilities. Use the rocket icon to make your collection public on the Smithsonian site. Create an assignment (file icon) to accompany a collection. Click on the pencil to open the editing tool; click the + icon in the left margin to add notes or design quiz questions for each image from a drop-down menu.
You can also peruse others’ collections. If you want to see what’s out there, don’t put anything in the search box on the homepage, but hit the enter key. It pulls up over a million resources. Narrow this down by selecting the Learning Lab tab on the left, under the search box. Now you can scroll through the 145 public Learning Lab collections. Hover over each to see the title and the creator. If you find one you like, click on it to open it. If you want to edit it, use the icons in the upper right corner to copy the collection. This adds the collection to your own collection and you can now edit and add to it as you like. Cool, huh? And useful. Thanks to the Smithsonian Learning Lab, you can now take your students on a customized tour of all that our nation’s greatest museum has to offer.
If you like this idea, you might also like:
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