The Museum-Ed Blog

O.K. my AAM 2007 presentation, called “How Teachers and Students Use Museum Web Sites” is too long to put into one blog so I’ve split it into two parts. Also, it’s just now occurred to me that I should have put all these notes into my PowerPoint, because if I had the PowerPoint would contain everything, and the PowerPoint is downloadable on AAM’s Media and Technology Committee Web site (they sponsored our session, thank you very much) at http://www.mediaandtechnology.org/panels/2007.html You can also download my co-panelists Melanie Buffington’s PowerPoint there. Anyway I put slide notations in my blog text, just in case you want to download the PowerPoint and follow along with what is written here. Whew!

(Slide 1) Let me start by saying that my observations are gathered from several years of conducting focus groups and working with teachers in the field, around Minnesota, in Boston and Baltimore, and twelve K-12 schools around the country as part of a pilot for ARTstor. These ARTstor pilot schools were studied in order to document teachers’ use of digital images of works of art in the classroom, and many of the digital images in ARTstor came from art museum collections. While I’ve been working with K-12 schools, teachers and students for many years, I have less experience working with museums other than art museums. Almost all of my presentation is based on working with a wide variety of K-12 teachers to implement online ART museum resources in the classroom.

(Slide 2) Before I get into how teachers and students use museum Web sites, it’s helpful to define what we mean by “use.” I have heard some museums qualify their definition of use to mean teachers using a museum Web site in the classroom with students, but it also can be argued that a teacher who gets an idea from looking at a museum Web site is still using the museum Web site, even though he or she may never return to the Web site again or direct students to the Web site. The same argument applies to a teacher who takes text, images or media from a museum Web site, and never returns to the Web site with students.

The reasons teachers may find it difficult to return to a Web site again and again or use a Web site with students often don’t have anything to do with the Web site, as I’ll explain in a moment. So, I would advocate for the widest definition of use possible, without being bothered by low “hits” or small statistics that normally define use of Web sites.

(Slide 3) The good news is that today, most teachers browse the Internet, including museum sites, looking for resources. It is hard to find a teacher anywhere who doesn’t use the Internet, if not at school then at home, to browse for resources, references or ideas. (Slide 4) While all teachers browse the Internet, only some teachers use the Internet as a teaching tool in their classrooms. One reason that some teachers do not use the Internet this way is simply a lack of equipment. Teachers may have a computer in their classroom connected to the Internet, but lack access to an LCD projector, or even a screen. Other teachers have no access to computer labs, or are forced to have three or four students at a time on one computer, so they’ll skip it in favor of other, more familiar and available media equipment like an overhead projector. Some teachers have a computer in their classroom that’s used solely for grading, and so lack software needed to make use of Internet resources.

(Slide 5) Some teachers lack the technical expertise to implement online teaching strategies. If a teacher is afraid that their students know more than they do about computer hardware or software, they may feel too intimidated to try online teaching strategies. Some teachers are the only technical resource students have, and if a student gets stuck, the teacher may not have the technical expertise to solve computer and user problems on the fly.

(Slide 6) Some teachers lack technical support to implement online teaching strategies. While a teacher may have the expertise to solve student and computer problems, school network issues are most likely out of their hands. Schools may block sites due to policy set by administrators, and individual teachers are often powerless to change those policies. Internet connections that aren’t dependable discourage many teachers from teaching “live” online, and broken peripheral equipment like projectors, printers and monitors often stymie teachers’ efforts to use technology with their students. (Slide 7) Finally, teachers lack the time to develop online teaching strategies.

(Slide Let’s unpack that “lack of time” barrier that we hear so much from teachers. First, like everyone else teachers will find the time to learn to use something they perceive as incredibly useful. They may not perceive your site as useful the first time they run across it, or the second time, but may sometime see how a museum’s online resources can be useful for their teaching, and then overcome barriers to using a museum Web site. (Slide 9) Connected to this idea is the reality that while teachers say they don’t have any time, what they really mean is that teaching is an enormously complex endeavor, and trying to figure out a meaningful space to slot museum materials into is as easy as putting a camel through the eye of a needle.

(Slide 10) Museums can help teachers create time to learn to use online museum resources by offering teacher-training courses. Teacher training gives teachers a block of time to concentrate on one set of things, and gives them time to generate ideas with each other and museum educators about how to use museum Web sites. Paying for substitute teachers is another way to create time for teachers. Many teachers aren’t willing to spend all of their evenings and weekends on professional development, and who could blame them? (Says the woman who delivered this presentation at a conference miles away from her family on Mother’s Day. But I digress.) Paying for substitute teachers gives teachers classroom time to learn about museum resources and how to use them. In other words, they are able to accomplish some professional development during working hours, like so many other professions.

(Slide 11) Many museum resources aren’t used because teachers can’t find them. Museums, and maybe especially art museums, are notoriously bad at indexing their sites so that when teachers and students Google a keyword or phrase, the museum site appears in the search returns. It’s also important to realize that many users don’t come in the front door of a Web site, and museum educators don’t always have control about what’s represented on the front door of the museum Web site. While the front door of a museum Web site may be narrow for teachers and students, museum educators can make the back door wide open by indexing and linking their resources to online searches. For procedures on this, see my blog: “How to Help Teachers Find Your Online Resources” dated May 10, 2007.

Teachers also may have trouble finding things on museum Web sites. On ArtsConnectEd, a joint educational portal developed by The Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Walker Art Center, teachers searched for terms such as “painting” and didn’t find anything because the museum classifies paintings as “oil on canvas.” Projects such as ArtsConnectEd II (http://ace2.artsconnected.org/) and Steve (http://www.steve.museum/) that utilize Web 2.0 tools such as social tagging will no doubt offer some remedy for these problems in the future.

(Slide 12) Teachers never use lesson plans or other online activities as museum educators design them. Teachers almost always break these materials apart and select “pieces” that will serve their individual classroom goals. This absolutely does not mean that museums should stop putting lesson plans on their Web sites. In fact lesson plans usually follow a format teachers are comfortable with, and offer easy to find ideas with along with practical information, such as materials needed to teach the lesson. But museums don’t need to agonize over which lesson plan format to use, or what standards to reference, etc. Any well written, pedagogically sound lesson plan will do.

On the topic of standards – state standards can be unreliable and should be used with caution. In the first version of ArtsConnectEd, museum staff spent hours mapping all the ArtsConnectEd resources to state standards, only to have a new governor elected the following year who threw out all the state standards. National standards are better, because most state standards are based on the national standards, because they are less likely to suffer political manipulation, and because when museum resources go online they are available to the world, not just the state where the museum lives.

(Slide 13) Teacher will put materials into the hands of students if they can. The time a teacher spends considering materials, planning how to implement them and revising them to suit his or her educational goals can be relatively long. But once a teacher slots material into their curriculum, it is a short step to handing those materials off to students. Good teachers spend an enormous amount of time revising things so that students can use them, because they know a handout with instructions and a worksheet in the hands of students is more powerful than a teacher lecturing for an hour at the front of the classroom. Museums can help teachers out by creating materials that can be easily handed off to students.

(Slide 14) Teachers view museum Web sites as authoritative sources, different from Google image search or Wikipedia. A teacher told me a story once about a middle school student who included a picture of an Egyptian pyramid in a paper, and cited the pyramid as coming from some guy’s Web site. Not the PICTURE of the pyramid, the student cited the picture as if John Doe had created the pyramid itself on his trip to Egypt in 1993. Teachers’ don’t have any trouble accepting material or information from students if the students can show they found it on a museum Web site.

(Slide 15) When museums think of their visitors, they often think of them as repeat visitors. As a result, museums change exhibitions often and upgrade services to keep the museum fresh and to meet the needs of the repeat visitor, as well as to tell the story of the museum over time. Teachers operate in exactly the opposite paradigm. Teachers use the same resources over and over as new students who have never experienced their lessons enter their classrooms each semester or year. Museums who want teachers to use their online resources have to leave them up and leave them alone, not an easy thing for many museums to do. But teachers count on resources being there over time, and if a teacher discovers that a museum takes down or significantly changes their online teaching resources after a year or two, that teacher probably won’t come back because he or she views the museum’s Web site as unreliable.

(Slide 16) It’s also useful to consider WHY teachers use museum Web sites, because how they use them is constantly changing. (Slide 17) According to Ferdi Serim in “NetLearning: Why Teachers Use the Internet” (Ferdi Serim and Melissa Koch, O’Reilly Publishers, June 1996) teachers use the Internet:

- To find low-cost or free materials
- To connect the classroom to the larger world.
- To help teachers manage time more efficiently.
- To motivate students.
- To give students opportunities to learn by doing.
- To expand opportunities for “telementoring”
- To help teachers communicate; share experience and ideas with other teachers.
- To help bring the school and the community closer together.
- To help teachers spread good news about what’s happening in their classrooms.
- To “rejuvenate” teachers’ professional lives.

Even though the tools of the Internet have changed a great deal since 1996, my guess is that Mr. Serim’s list of reasons for teachers using the Internet is still pretty accurate.

Finally, if you can, take all this into account and then try something. I recently worked on an interdisciplinary online resource for teachers and students on behalf of The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. (Integrating the Arts: Mummies, Manuscripts and Madonnas http://www.thewalters.org/education_art/education_educationalmedia.aspx) There are many activities on the Web site, some designed to be printed and others designed to be online interactives. The most popular activity of all is a matching game, where students match up pictures of proverbs from a Renaissance manuscript with the written proverb the picture represents. Language teachers love the activity, because it allows kids to practice reading comprehension, because it’s a way for kids who don’t write well to be successful, and because it’s an excellent exercise for students who are just learning English. We didn’t think of all that when we created it, we just put it out there. But once teachers gave us the feedback about why they were using it, we realized that our little proverb matching game actually addresses numbers one through five in the list above about why teachers use the Internet.

In my experience teachers often don’t use museum Web sites simply because they can’t find them. Here’s our successful method of linking online museum resources into other online resources so that teachers have an easier time searching for them. (This has been posted previously on the Museum-Ed Discussion List, please forgive the cross-posting.)

We spend a couple of days at the launch of a project going through the Internet searching for portals, news sites and other resources like ours. At the same time we define key words for our project, for example art education, k-12 social studies, interdisciplinary, teaching, learning, etc. Searching the Internet using key words often leads to more key words and the ability to refine key words based on search returns.

Next we draft a letter of inquiry that can be used repeatedly requesting a link or a listing of our product on related Web sites. The letter usually includes a long and short description of the project so you can send either, which ever is suitable for publishing, as well as the keywords from the previous activity that will help others find it on Web portals. For example on http://www.educating.net/addsite.htm is a form that requires site name, URL, description, contact name, email and phone. On other sites all that’s required is the letter we’ve drafted sent to an email address.

It’s also important to submit your letter, or other request, to all search engines like Google and Yahoo. Search engines contain their own listings of topics, for example Google has a social studies page for kids: http://www.google.com/Top/Kids_and_Teens/School_Time/Social_Studies/

Also don’t hesitate to request listings on teacher’s sites or blogs. Informal is as good as formal on the Web. Finally, we always track submissions on a spreadsheet so that if more information is required or a second contact is necessary there won’t be any duplication.

This diagram from Scott Sayre’s 2001 AAM presentation “Click, Click, Who’s There?” illustrates the multitude of barriers restricting a large audience from significant content. As the audience approaches access, it’s diminished by each of the barriers.