Week 3

Taking an Interactive Tour

Free images from http://acobox.com

Interactive tours are a great way to increase student interest and engagement.  Such tours enable students to take a "virtual field trip" to locations far and near.  This week's blog posting will provide insight into tools that can enable such field trips.

As an example, a high school teacher of American History wants to tour art museum exhibitions related to historic time periods being studied.  Her class is located on the west coast of the United States, but she want to view exhibits at two New York City museums.  The tour will include an interactive discussion with the museum curator on the features and styles of the art exhibits.  The students will then critique two works of art from each exhibition, as selected by the teacher.

A variety of tools can be used to accomplish this type of interactive tour.  The first option is to see if a virtual tour of  the exhibit of interest has already been made available on the internet.  Museums,  like most other businesses and entities, have a presence on the web.  On their websites, the teacher can locate a variety of current and previous exhibitions.  These virtual exhibits may provide pictures, textual  information, narrated videos, and interactive media.   Some American History exhibitions currently available include the Metropolitan Museum of Art's American Wing that offers exhibits of furniture, architecture, ceramics, glass, pewter, silver, and jewelry, as well as an exhibition of Native North America Art  that provides picture, text, and video of specific exhibits.  Additional videos are offered on the Metropolitan Museum of Art's You Tube channel.    Other sources offering  virtual multimedia tours of exhibitions from a variety of museums include the PBS arts website and the Google Art Project.  The tools required for this type of  interactive tour are simply a computer with internet access attached to a large screen TV or a digital projector and screen.  Alternatively, if students have individual computers with audio earphones or earbuds, each student can take an individualized tour.  The virtual tour could then be accompanied or followed by an interactive session with museum staff to discuss exhibits and address student questions.

Alternatively, if the teacher has a contact with the museum curator, the museum staff may be willing to create a custom tour.  Capabilities provided by digital cameras, digital audio-video recorders  make it easy for novices to record images and sound files that can easily be loaded on to a computer.  Museum staff can share images and video by posting them on the web using wikis, uploading videos to YouTube , presenting them using web conferencing tools, or even through streaming video/webcast if the school and the museum have these capabilities.  If the museum curator is willing, a particularly effective, relatively simple option for engaging the students would be to set up a web conference that would allow the students to view pictures and videos of the exhibits while being able to converse with the museum staff.  A number of tools are available to web conference, including GoToMeeting, Webex, and Adobe Connect.  Web conferencing tools allow the museum staff to present pictures and videos from their computer  to the teacher's computer or students computer(s).  The teacher can connect her computer to a large screen TV or digital projector to display images to the entire class.  Speakers and a microphone attached to the class computer(s) and the museum  computer enable two-way conversation.  The session can even be recorded for viewing later.

Following the exhibition presentation, the teacher wants to divide her students into small groups to critique selected exhibits.  A variety of tools can provide an interesting, 21st-century collaborative experience.  Blogs or wikis are excellent tools for enabling students to report and reflect on information.  For this situation, since the teacher wants the students to report and reflect in small groups, wikis such as wikispaces would work well.  Another option is to have students video their critique using an inexpensive, easy-to-use video recorder such as the FlipVideo.  This provides a welcome variation to the standard written summary.

References

Adobe Connect (2010).  Retrieved from http://connect.brand.us.sem.adobe.com/content/try?sdid=IEAST&skwcid=TC|22191|adobe%20connect||S|p|5894708062.

Art Project: Powered by Google (2008).  Retrieved from http://www.googleartproject.com/.

Cisco Webex (2011).  Retrieved from http://www.webex.com/.

FlipVideo (2011).  Retrieved from http://www.theflip.com/en-us/.

GoToMeeting (2011).  Retrieved from http://www.gotomeeting.com/.

Metropolitan Museum of Art: The New American Wing (2011).  Retrieved from http://www.metmuseum.org/works_of_art/american_decorative_arts/american_wing_2009.

Metropolitan Museum of Art; Special Exhibitions (2011).  Retrieved from http://www.metmuseum.org/special/se_event.asp?OccurrenceId=%7b67815B03-6866-46AD-ACEF-C637B4C52B1F%7d.

PBS Arts (2010),  Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/arts/.

Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2009). Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education (4th ed.) Boston, MA: Pearson.

Wikispaces (2011). Retrieved from http://www.wikispaces.com/.

YouTube: Metropolitan Museum of Art (N.D.).  Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/user/metmuseum#g.