| 
  • If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

Growing Your Audience

Page history last edited by Nancy Proctor 13 years, 6 months ago

Paper title: Growing Your Audience: Reaching Kids Online with Digital Museum Educational Resources

 

Presenter: Darren Milligan (Director of Digital Media Projects, Center for Education and Museum Studies, Smithsonian Institution)

 

Brief Abstract:

Museums’ traditional education outreach philosophies center on direct contact with teachers: one teacher will impact many students. The success of this model, however, relies heavily on the teachers' discovery of your content and their ability to manipulate it into their district or state-controlled curricula. As technology lowers the barriers to direct outreach, the opportunity exists for museums to transform their formal educational resources into informal digital educational experiences for kids directly, in the school or at home.

 

Smithsonian in Your Classroom (SIYC), reaches more than 80,000 schools twice a year. The session presents a case study illustrating a kid-centric reinvention of the SIYC publication. The process of creating both print and interactive game/simulation will be discussed. Participants will see that the challenge is not one of digitization of the existing lesson plans, but the transformation of the educational content from a teacher-led classroom group activity to a more personalized self-directed online.

 

Abstract

Museums’ traditional education outreach philosophies center on direct contact with teachers. The concept is one of transference: one teacher will impact many students. The success of this model, however, relies heavily on the teachers' discovery of your content and their ability to manipulate it into their district or state-controlled curricula. While there are more than 6 million teachers in the U.S. alone, there are more than 50 million primary and secondary students. As technology lowers the barriers to direct outreach, the opportunity exists for museums with traditional publishing models to transform their formal educational resources into informal digital educational experiences for kids directly, in the school or at home. The Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies, the central education office at the Smithsonian Institution, has developed lesson plans for teachers for more than 30 years. Its print publication, Smithsonian in Your Classroom (SIYC), reaches more than 80,000 schools twice a year (every elementary and middle school in the U.S.). Each issue contains a background essay and two or three interrelated lesson plans and classroom activities on a specific topic from a uniquely Smithsonian multidisciplinary perspective. The publication highlights the work of innovative Smithsonian researchers (especially through employee profiles and interviews), unique collections, and topics relevant to teachers and their students. The session presents a case study illustrating a kid-centric reinvention of the SIYC publication. The topic is fundamentals of size and distance in the Universe. The process of creating both print and interactive game/simulation will be discussed (both formats serve to give the user background content, activities, and Smithsonian expert exposure, but in ways unique to the medium). Participants will see that the challenge is not one of digitization of the existing lesson plans (as HTML and online PDF versions of the issues have existed for several years), but the transformation of the educational content from a teacher-led classroom group activity to a more personalized self-directed online experience (for example, in the interactive version, the kids have the opportunity to compare extra-planetary distances using their home address). Opportunities (such as the reuse of activity content in multiple mediums) and ongoing challenges (including a needed change model to allow user testing and iteration) faced by the Smithsonian will be elaborated.

 

 

Session Info

  • Type: Individual Paper
  • Keywords: education, publishing, outreach, gaming, smithsonian, student, teacher, kid
  • Relevance: The session targets museum staff members involved in educational resource development, publishing, digital media creation, and gaming. It serves to represent a case study of a transition from traditional educator-based resource development to digital media-based outreach to kids.

 

 

Bio

 

Darren Milligan

Darren Milligan is the designer and director of digital media projects at the Center for Education and Museum Studies at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, USA. There he produces digital learning resources, manages social media initiatives, and directs websites including the two-time People's Voice Webby-Award-winning digital portal for education at the Smithsonian, smithsonianeducation.org. He served as art director and producer of the Institution’s teacher magazine (Smithsonian in Your Classroom) and integrated online interactive IdeaLabs, distributed to every primary and secondary school in the United States (more than 80,000 schools serving 30 million students). In 2008, he also worked on the team that established the Smithsonian as one of the founding institutional members of the Flickr Commons (flickr.com/commons). Prior to the Smithsonian, he developed digital citizen-science projects and online mentoring communities at the nonprofit Purple Martin Conservation Association (www.purplemartin.org). Darren is a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, the American Association of Museums Media and Technology Committee, and serves on various Smithsonian committees focused on education and web/new media strategies.  Darren is also an amateur photographer and manages the blog, www.printedprimate.org, focusing on pre-photographic images of primates in western cultures.

Comments (0)

You don't have permission to comment on this page.