Creating On-line Educational Resources by Recycling Exhibition Content at the North Carolina Museum of History

Elizabeth Crist, North Carolina Museum of History, USA
http://ncmuseumofhistory.org

Demonstration: Demonstrations - Session 2

This demonstration will address the development and implementation of two on-line educational resources at the North Carolina Museum of History that make use of existing high-quality content. Both on-line professional development workshops for educators and a new on-line resource database recycle previously produced exhibition content.

The teacher workshop section will address the development and implementation of a series of seven on-line professional development workshops for educators of all subjects and levels. These on-line programs provides a convenient, inexpensive way for teachers to connect with the museum, earn continuing education credits, and access high-quality information on a variety of North Carolina history topics. The workshops also provide a way to creatively reuse resources created for exhibits and museum programs, generate new research and material, and reach educators spread out geographically beyond easy access to a physical museum visit.

Educators log onto the workshops to find extensive background information, images featuring artifacts and photographs in the museum's collection, bibliographies and webliographies for both teachers and students, timelines, tips on evaluating and using on-line resources, and assignments. Several also include Flash features with oral histories, virtual artifacts, and interactive timelines. Visitors to the demonstration can also learn about the challenges and successes we've experienced with the program, and our plans for its future.

The resource database section will offer a tour of the on-line database structure and design. This database offers information about several hundred resources available from our institution, many of which are also available on-line via digitized files, on-line streaming, and other formats. The content is searchable by subject, keyword, content area, format, age, and curriculum goals in the Standard Course of Study.

This presentation will also make available a nuts and bolts discussion of the development and implementation process, from creating an plan of action, ways of delineating what resources to include, database creation and population, various staff roles, working with contractors, interface design, and using focus groups to test and retest the website interface and data. The demonstration will give the participants the opportunity to see and interact with the published database, including many of the multimedia resources included within.