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March 15, 2001

Return to Museum-School Connections in the Digital Age

Museums Across the Curriculum

You can find a wealth of resources through online museums, no matter what your particular interest is. Here's a sampling.

Art, Theater, Dance, Music

As you would expect, the lively arts are well represented online.

American Ballet Theatre The company that was home to Baryshnikov offers dancer biographies, photos, and a list of works in its repertory with links to information on composers and choreographers.

Experience Music Project Seattle's institution for appreciating and preserving all forms of popular music has a spectacular Web site packed with artifacts, interviews, and more.

Louvre If you can't get to Paris anytime soon, stroll through the Louvre's collections and avoid the crowd at the Mona Lisa. Visually stunning and offering remarkable breadth, this site features a history of the institution, virtual tours, and more.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art A beautiful site with over 3,500 objects to view and enjoy, excellent contextual information, and educational resources. There are specialized "tours" as well as thematic groupings to navigate the resources.

English & Language Arts

From Anna Akhmatova to Zane Grey, museums and historic sites honoring the world's literary lions abound.

Bartleby.com This is an amazing searchable resource of reference works, verse, fiction, and nonfiction. Highlights include character lists, links to critical works, and searchable texts.

The Morgan Library Take a look at a Gutenberg Bible or Henry Thoreau's journal, as well as a host of other historical documents, literary manuscripts, and musical scores.

The On-Line Books Page A gold mine of e-texts, this site has over 13,000 texts available for your perusal, as well as thematic collections including banned books, works by women writers, and more.

The World of Dostoyevsky Great inquisitors and Raskolnikov fans will enjoy browsing through the life and works of this famed Russian writer.

Math

Mathematics isn't the most common organizing concept for a museum, but here are a few sites worth investigating.

The Goudreau Museum of Mathematics in Art & Science While the site primarily informs visitors about goings-on at this institution in New Hyde Park, N.Y., there is a fractal drawing area and information on Goudreau's If I Had a Hammer series of workshops, where kids work together to construct a house-utilizing all the math and science that such an undertaking implies.

Totally Tessellated Tessellations are the beautiful geometric designs most familiar to us through the work of M.C. Escher. This site explores Escher's work and shows you how to make tessellations with your students. The site, created by high school students, was part of the 1998 ThinkQuest competition.

Science

Web sites from zoos, science centers, observatories, and beyond bring science to life for students.

The Academy of Natural Sciences Philadelphia's famed institution-the oldest science museum in the country-offers a wealth of resources and projects for teachers and students.

Bishop Museum A personal favorite of mine, the Bishop offers science and anthropology exhibits with a Hawaiian twist. Of special note is the Science Information Network, with wide-ranging offerings including Pacific Island exploration, space, and volcano resources.

Hands-On Science Centers Worldwide Going to KwaZulu-Natal soon? You'll be able to check out the Web site for its science center, as well as science centers around the world, from this page. It's a great place to start your search for science resources.

Rose Center for Earth and Space Excellent resources for space science from the American Museum of Natural History make this a delightful Web experience. The Rose Center offers virtual tours, activities and resources, and a weekly space watch that tells you what's really happening over your head.

Social Studies

History comes alive online, with many grassroots projects and large-scale document warehouses providing ample source material.

A-Bomb WWW Museum This site tells the story of "Little Boy," the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, from the vantage point of those on the ground. There is also an active peace initiative woven into the site, with opportunities to participate in a forum on current nuclear testing.

Anne Frank House An excellent resource for teaching about the Holocaust, this site will bring home the reality of the tiny space in which Anne wrote her famous diary. Educational materials and visuals bring this tragic story to life.

The British Museum You'll find remarkable resources from this institution-a compass of world cultures guides you through the daunting collection, and activities and materials make this a rich educational resource. It is graphically intense, so beware: you may want to cache the parts you need to use offline if bandwidth is an issue.

National Archives and Records Administration Looking for primary source documents? This site is a gold mine, with digitized versions of American history's greatest hits-the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights-as well as more incidental source material such as veterans records. It also offers strong educational resources, plus a section on creating your own archives.

Smithsonian Institution This umbrella site serves as your gateway to educational resources created to interpret the myriad holdings of this preeminent institution.

Additional Museum Resources

Visit Museum Stores Online for videos, games, posters, CDs, and other merchandise offered in museum stores. Users can search by region and by type of museum, such as art, history, science and technology, and other categories.

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