Updates
Understanding Biodiversity with Smithsonian Collections
A few weeks ago, educators from the Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access were invited to join the Smithsonian Science Education Center in their summer workshop on the topic of Biodiversity. The workshop included fifteen teachers from around the country, including California, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, New York, Texas, Virginia, and Washington DC, who teach science subject areas from the elementary level through Adv...
An Australian Teacher's Perspectives on the Learning Lab
My name is Dr Kathy Mackey and I am a Vice Principal with the Queensland Academies in Australia. I have been working with the SCLDA team as part of my Fellowship this spring. The Queensland Academies are a group of three senior high schools that offer the International Baccalaureate Diploma program. The Fellowship has allowed me to consider the potentials of the Learning Lab in relation to the broader suite of educational pr...
Let’s Talk about Discoverability
Melissa Wadman and I were on the road again last month, but this time around we visited Atlanta to talk to attendees at the American Alliance of Museums Annual Meeting about the strategies that we have taken to improve the discoverability of Smithsonian-authored learning resources. That's right, we were talking about metadata. You know, that “structured information that describes, explains, locates, or otherwise makes it eas...
Building Simple Tools to Enhance Student Learning
So far on the Learning Lab blog, we have shared some ideas for teaching collections you could create by aggregating or sequencing a variety of resources from collection objects, video interviews with Smithsonian experts, magazine articles, and more. Another feature of the Learning Lab, its simple tools, will enhance the ways students and teachers interact with these digitized museum objects in ways that make individualized sense ...
Student Data: Privacy, Transparency, and Data Protections for Youth Users
Recently, SCLDA hosted the 2015 State Teachers of the Year for a day of behind-the-scenes “show and tell" at the Smithsonian, during which we introduced the Learning Lab and had informal discussions about what America's best teachers expected from Smithsonian digital resources. At my table, one teacher's eyes lit up when I asked her how she and her English language arts students might benefit. “Well, this will be a resource that I can trust," she ...
