Museums and Learning

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I love to organize field trips to museums. I learned a lot in regular museums.
Museums have all of the resources, and experts in a central place. Schools are different in organization , content, and resources.Experts sometimes.

Museums can rightfully say, resources are us No teacher’s closet or technology can compete.Museums have exhibits and interactive areas. Some have movies as well.Exciting things happen in museums.Here is a relative staging the Lion King at the National History Museum. Museums often are rented out for important meetings as a beautiful venue for a group. My relatives presented the Lion King with the Howard University Choir.

Adam


HOW DO YOU START?

To connect children and parents who have no experience with museums there are a few books that might be an introduction, but I usually find something that the children like and we go and explore , The Museum by Susan Verde and Peter Reynolds.My favorite is The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Frankweiler.Then, there is Museum Trip by Barbara Leman.

Museums have outreach programs for everyone.

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MUSEUMS AND LEARNING PLACES HAVE CHANGED!

Museums can open doors to discovery

The Smithsonian has a museum you can 3D print from. The Smithsonian is digitalized.Peek into the world of digitalization here.

“Through digitization, the Smithsonian seeks to broaden access to its treasures, safeguard them for future generations, speed research, add meaning, encourage collaboration and integrate its holdings across museums and programs, and on platforms where our audiences engage with them.”


1.The Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access

To understand the needs of teachers, students, and museum educators, the Center spent more than a decade in active experimentation and research, culminating in the launch of this new online platform—the Smithsonian Learning Lab. Since its launch in 2016, museum and classroom educators have used the Lab’s tools to create thousands of new examples—ranging from experiments to models—for using Smithsonian resources for learning.

2.”The Smithsonian Learning Lab is about discovery, creation, and sharing.”

“The Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access created the Smithsonian Learning Lab to inspire the discovery and creative use of its rich digital materials—more than a million images, recordings, and texts. It is easy to find something of interest because search results display pictures rather than lists. Whether you’ve found what you were looking for or just discovered something new, it’s easy to personalize it. Add your own notes and tags, incorporate discussion questions, and save and share. The Learning Lab makes it simple.”

Traveling the world, seeking out museums has been my quest. But now you can have a museum in your pocket.You have a museum in your pocket with a cell phone of a certain quality.


Cool Online Museums for Curious Kids

Look here for many kinds of links.
Common Sense Media

Museum in your pocket?
You can travel to outstanding museums by looking up their sites online.
Then there are the outreach to citizens. Exhibits and Sites.

Going to a museum can be an amazing learning experience, but why limit yourself to the few museums in your area? With these apps, games, and websites, kids can engage with interactive experiences from some of the best museums all over the world. From finding their classic art twin on Google Arts & Culture to playing dinosaur trivia from the American Museum of Natural History, kids can find tons of hidden gems on this list.

Here are a few links:
The Smithsonian Museums
Smithsonian museums

The Smithsonian offers eleven museums and galleries on the National Mall and six other museums and the National Zoo in the greater National Capital Area. In New York City, we invite you to tour two museums in historic settings. Here is their message in a video.

Not near a Smithsonian museum? Look for exhibitions and affiliate museums in your community.Or look online for ways to interact with the Smithsonian.

The Hermitage in Saint Petersburg,Russia
The Virtual Tour of the Hermitage

Gathering resources to teach in a museum is a quick assemblage of things to teach with and experts to guide the learning journey.

Here is the Bardo Museum .
This is the site in English. Here is their virtual tour.
The TePapa Museum
in Wellington, New Zealand is a treat.Look here to see what is being featured.
The British Museum is a treat.
The British Museum has a special learning page.

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Chemena

Have you seen this book?
You can share your favorite museums with us.

Have you seen this book?
You can share your favorite museums with us.

Reaching Community, Teaching Adults and Seniors

by Victor Sutton

In a look back many of us have discovered that a whole generation of people have been excluded from a personal use of technology. Everyone was not born digital or included in learning how to use technology for personal use.
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Computers for Seniors Kicks Off

BY VIC SUTTON, CHAIR, SWNA TASK FORCE ON WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT & ADULT EDUCATION

Computer for Kids classes have been taking place at the James Creek computer lab for years now,using desktop computers. They started in 2007, as an initiative by Thelma Jones, who chairs the Youth Activities Task Force of the Southwest Neighborhood Assembly (SWNA).

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The classes are taught by Gerald Brown and Jenelle Leonard, with support from Jones, Cheryl Moore, Bonnie Sutton and the author. Students learn keyboarding skills, and then some basic uses of the computers. If they attend regularly, they get to take the computers home when they graduate.

At one point Christine Spencer, president of the Resident Council at James Creek, observed “computers for kids is all very well, but what about computers for seniors?”

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She had a point. The SWNA Task Force on Workforce Development and Adult Education took heed, and looked into how to organize computer training classes for seniors.
The Task Force is currently running two series’ of eight weekly classes. One is at Syphax Gardens, for seniors from Syphax and from James Creek, which started on April 16. The other is at River Park, for AARP members. This class started on May 3.
There are ten seniors in each class.Perry

The seniors’ classes are taught by Jenelle Leonard, with technical support from Perry Klein and Jamal Jones.

They commence with an introduction to the notebook computer—starting from basics, like how to plug it in and turn it on and off—and then going on to using Windows 10 and the basics of applications like Microsoft Word.

The classes have had terrific support. Rhonda Hamilton, President of the Syphax Gardens Resident Council, is hosting the classes at Syphax Gardens, and Betty Jean Tolbert Jones, President of the South- west AARP chapter, has helped to set up the classes at River Park.jamal

Klein, who chairs the SWNA Technology Task Force, received a donation of 50 notebook computers from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which Neo Morake has been refurbishing. Jamal Jones has been setting up the notebooks at both of the classes, bringing a hotspot so that participants can access the Internet. SWNA’s Computers for Seniors Class also received a 2019 Education Award from the Southwest Waterfront Chapter of the AARP in support of the classes.

After four classes the participants get to take the notebook computers home, to be able to practice what they have been learning, and after the full series of eight classes they get to keep them.

*The class at Syphax had a lively introduction to ways of accessing their favorite musicians, or videos on YouTube, one student however, accessed videos for making chocolate cake. She liked seeing other people making her favorite dessert. At the end of the class , everyone was still engaged in exploring YouTube for whatever purpose they desired. All lamented that there was only one more class to go.