Third Time's The Charm

Our group’s media literacy project on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Museum Box would work wonderfully in the language arts classroom.  As stated on the Museum Box site, Museum Box “provides the tools for you to build up an argument or description of an event, person or historical period by placing items in a virtual box.”   Here is an example of a Museum Box on the novel The Giver by Lois Lowry.  This is a great example of how this technological site can be used in the classroom.  I’m sure you can imagine how it could also work for Science, Social Studies, Health and other classes.

I believe that by using Museum Box, I would be following the Visions of the Cobb County Technology Plan.  The following items would gained by the students using this technology:

2. As they learn, students will develop and practice information literacy. They will use technology and critical thinking to efficiently seek out information, critically evaluate the information they find, and use information effectively to solve problems and generate new knowledge.

4. Student learning will be further enhanced through open access to other online communication tools and information
resources, including engaging, participatory tools such as wikis, blogs, and social networking.

6. Students and teachers will use technology to extend learning beyond the classroom and the school day, including
consistent, reliable access to learning tools throughout their day—at home, in class, and everywhere in between.

7. Students will learn through collaboration, both with their classmates and with others around the world.

The NCTE guidelines also support the use of this wonderful site:

• Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally
• Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes
• Manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information
• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts

Please be aware that the Museum Box website is aware of its use by schools.  They have a special section for teachers!  A school would register at Museum Box and then a teacher registers and gets a password.  She then can assign “boxes” to students with passwords by groups or individually.  Through teacher passwords, the teacher moderates the work of students from her class.  Teachers have the option to approve-reject-edit-delete the work her classes have done.  Once the work is approved it appears on the site.  It is the respsonsiblity of the teachers and students to ensure that all work posted on Museum Box does not infringe on copyrights, that information taken from other areas such as websites and books is sited properly.  These are all things that we strive to teach our students in the classroom.

To answer the question that I know is coming, Museum Box takes down any work that would be deemed offensive.  They even have a web address to report offensive postings in the event they have missed them.  As the teacher, I would be responsible to ensure that my students would not post anything inappropriate.

The Museum Box website allows students to be creative and use several different technologies as they “create” their box.  Because these boxes are posted, the students can take ownership of their work on a national and international level.  There are safeguards in place to protect students from anything that might be deemed inappropriate.  Additionally, as stated above, the use of this wonderful resource, fulfills many of the technological requirements outlined by Cobb County and the NCTE.

When you have a moment, please take the time to look at some of the projects other students at other schools have done on Museum Box.  Once you see this great resource, you will be sold on it’s use in the classroom as I have been.

I just found this at cnn, it’s by Sir KenRobinson an expert on creativiey and innovation.