The Smithsonian Learning Lab is a new digital platform
that allows anyone to discover and use
the digital collections and resources of the Smithsonian.
Teachers have been our core audience and we're trying to understand how does the
Smithsonian do a better job of serving teachers
in a digital space. So it's a place where users can come to
find all the objects that we digitize from a collection, which is now more than
a million things.
You can find all of our digital learning resources which is several thousand
lesson plans and web sites and content online that connects our
collections with learning initiatives.
All the amazing digital resources that the Smithsonian has available
in one place. So many of our students on the west coast
can't access the Smithsonian--it's not possible
and it's such a part of our American culture that it's really
an amazing opportunity for our students over here to access all the things that the Smithsonian
offers 3,000 miles away.
To understand what it is that people want, we've gone into classrooms, we've
gone into after-school programs,
and we've laid out our collections and then we watched what people do with them.
We've been listening to what it is that they want to do. These resources
aren't like a traditional
lesson plan.They're not designed and formatted and published as a really
specific sequence.
They're built in a way that enables a teacher to customize them.
The beauty of the entire program is that it is at your disposal
and you're in charge now of what you want to do
with this opportunity. For my own purposes, I wanted to be able to
integrate things that I was already doing in my classroom
with this incredible program and so it gave me an opportunity to kinda marry
both which for for my purposes has worked out beautifully.
The Learning Lab will present teachers with an opportunity
to identify resources that work for them,
cluster them away so that they're easily found, they may share them,
maybe with their students, maybe with other educators across the country.
Teachers can be
confident that it's going to be addressing the things that they need to
teach,
but at the same time, on the interface on the way in for the student,
it's going to be more about them, where they have a chance to explore their
interests,
create collections, ask questions, talk to each other,
complete activities to show what they accomplished. What we want to do is make
all our collections available so it's
easy for a teacher to tailor it to those particular needs, to the particular
voices she has in her classroom.
The thing that really intrigued me was the student choice aspect.
It's all driven by them and that's a really powerful thing for middle school
age kids because it's all about them
and a lot of times the things that happen in their lives aren't driven by them.
My favorite part was probably being able to put the pictures and items into
like your collection and you can like edit it.
Even for people who come to our museums, we only have about one percent of our
collections--1 percent of our 138
million collections, available on display at any time. So what about all those
others?
Well, now digitally, not only are you going to be able to see the collections but
you can see those particular collections that may not even be on
display.
We're capturing objects in our collections
at the rate of one every six seconds. We're sharing more than ever in full
resolution and high resolution,
so that folks, teachers, students, people in the world are actually able to see
this
from their homes, from their classrooms at the full detail that
we're capturing at here today.
So each time an user comes back to the Learning Lab
there will be new resources available--both new digital museum collections available but
also new resources that other users have made. So it'll be really an environment
that's continually
changing and adapting to the needs of its users. The bottom line is that we want to
be meaningful
over time to the audiences that we would like to see
use our free resources as often as they can.
I've been a classroom teacher and I've taught in urban schools and I've
taught in small country schools, where there was only one school in town
and in both of those environments, what I wanted was to show my kids the bigger
world,
to show them all the possibilities and with
this Learning Lab, I think that's what we can do.