Diverse Exhibits
Staff at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia have been steadily involved in telecommunications...
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Staff at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia have been steadily involved in telecommunications. The exhibits there (here) are especially tailored for remote access. Previews of the exhibits for each month are posted regularly.
The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago represents an updating of this genre for the online age. It is now the home of "Sue", the largest fossil of a T-rex dinosaur. A virtual tour is available but first the visitor "shrinks" in size to a scale appropriate to viewing the dinosaur and its environs.
The Smithsonian, a collection of museums, has been plugged in for several years and their specialists are working towards injecting greater interactivity into their displays. For the first time the curators have mounted an exhibit which is only available online and exploits new Java applications. Take a look at Revealing Things--from each object a cultural study is launched.
The Exploratorium's (San Francisco) permanent collections emphasize physics and a unique version of psychobiology. Students serve as explainers for the exhibits and visitors can observe the making of exhibits onsite. Special exhibits have offered telecollaboration multimedia projects, such as designing a virtual city and exchange of data with NASA's airborne observatory. It maintained a CUSeeMe for live conferencing and glimpses of the technology used to graft Forrest Gump onto historical videos. The Exploratorium has school, industry and museum partners across the US. The Web site also displays a what's new listing with excellent links. Don't miss the Sports Science section for your enthusiastic fans. It incorporates new technologies, also.
An online course (50 hours) for constructing virtual museums is available at the wednet site. Museummania sells curriculum-based museum guidebooks for kids.
Virtual Library Museums is one of the most comprehensive listings of all museums worldwide. The University of California at Berkeley's Museum of Paleontology, like the Franklin Insitute site, is wonderfully designed for online access. The level of microdetail, so to speak, will stun your students (and you) with fascination. It synthesizes the study of evolution with the "nature of science".
A1 is a map of Indianopolis. Following a path through the civic center to the museum, you will arrive at the exhibits for children.
The Tech Lab at Michigan State has prepared a special zoo exhibit for you; it is devoted to microbes. ThinkQuest has a section devoted to ticks and mites--larger than microbes but pesky little creatures. The US National Library of Medicine exhibits the Visible Human (both sexes). You may need some plug-ins to fully absorb the contents in this site. The site managers are incorporating new views in parallel with new tools. As the saying goes, biology was never like this when I was in school!
And virtual museums are not closed for summer vacation. A summer trip to Mars? Try the Franklin Institute..
MOOM or Museum of Online Museums shows links to familiar spaces like the Musee D'Orsay, international sites like Kyoto, and oddities only online like billboards. An interesting online phenomenon..
The American Museum of Natural History in New York City now has a digital library collection to complement its amazing exhibits. The city of Petra, once the seat of the Nabbatean Kingdom, can be toured online. Its major topics are anthropology, astronomy, biology, earth science, and paleontology. Most visitors think of this museum as very traditional but the online site is engaging for young children with videos, interactive activities, etc. The text itself is accessible. Highly recommended.
Guide to Visiting Museums, published by the DOEducation,is targeted towards both novice teachers and parents. It was designed for real museums but can be adopted for virtual museums as well.
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The exhibits at these museums rotate between visiting and permanent collections. Encouraging your younger students to visit from time to time will help them learn about the role of museums in our national cultural life as well as the actual content itself. These sites are among the best on the Web for any age!
