The working life of Museum of London

As promised in my previous post this blog post is to let you know that the new learning sections are now live on both the Museum of London and the Museum of London Docklands websites.

Go to the Museum of London Learning section

Go to the Museum of London Docklands Learning section

This is the end of quite a big work project for me and I’m quite pleased with the results.

There are three big reasons why the new sections are a good thing:

1. They tidy up the way that we present a large amount of information about our learning programmes online
2. They give a nice, easy, attractive and clear way for children to find a selection of our fun online games (see kids section)
3. You can now find out information through either of the two websites (Museum of London and Museum of London Docklands)

A substantial number of the resources that were previously available are still available on the sites. Let us know in the comments below if you can’t find anything and we’ll try and direct you.

There are also some new resources. Here are 6 cool new things featured in the new learning sections:

1. We took this opportunity to make some new interactive whiteboard presentations and quizzes available for KS2 Tudors, KS2 Anglo-Saxons, KS2 Romans, KS3 Romans and KS3 Medieval.  See the resources section for more information.
2. Each of our schools sessions now have their own webpage which will eventually link to the relevant teachers pack (some are already up, others are coming soon).  See the Museum of London ‘what’s on -schools’ section and the Museum of London Docklands ‘what’s on – schools’ section for more information.
3. Each of our adult courses now has their own page as well.  See the ‘adult courses’ section
4. We have a regularly updated ‘session availability‘ pages for Museum of London and Museum of London Docklands so you can check before calling the box office which dates are still available for the school session you’d like
5. There’ll be information to help you with your risk assessments going up very soon
6. It should be much easier to join our Teachers Network and stay informed!

Please look at the new sites and let me know what you think, especially if you regularly used the old site.  I hope you find the new sites useful and easy to use!

This is just a very quick blog post to say that a revised Learning section will be available on the Museum of London and Museum of London Docklands websites soon. Hopefully the changes will help you to find our learning resources more easily.

The Learning section will include:

• information for teachers about our schools programmes
• printable resources for teachers to support our schools programmes
• online resources for teachers and pupils to use either to support a visit to the Museums or independently
• fun games for children to play online
• information about our adult learning courses
• factpacks to help you learn more about the history of London

Why not take a look around the site as it looks at the moment http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/learning. It’s already got loads of interesting stuff on there. We’re not adding any new resources at this stage, we’re just trying to make it easier to find.

Take a look around now and get familiar with how it looks at the moment. I’d love to hear your feedback on how it compares once the new site is launched!

In January this year I blogged about my role as e-Learning Officer (Web) here at the Museum of London. In that post, I mentioned that I was working on two interactive games for 3-5 year olds which was a really fun project. This post is a quick follow on from that one to say that the games are now live!

Create a costume

In Create a costume children have the opportunity to design and colour costumes based on items in the Museum’s collections by dragging on shapes and patterns and then colouring them in with a paintbrush and some paints.  The costumes that the designs are based on are:

• a pearly king’s jacket
• the Fanshawe dress
• a pair of Georgian shoes

Move and Make

In Move and Make they can make a historical vehicle or building by dragging on the different elements. At the end, they can invent their own! In both games the children have the chance to see real objects/vehicles/buildings and find out a little bit more about them.

Adult guidelines to both games give accompanying adults some helpful hints on how to get the most out of the games as a family and provide a bit more in-depth information about each object/vehicle/building to talk to their children about.  We’ve also indicated whether and where you can see the objects for real. The games will be available not only online but also in our Clore Learning Centre and can be used as well as part of our Under-5s programme.

Working on the project

I’d never really worked on a project like this before, I’d project managed other web projects but never a game. Parts of it were great fun and the whole thing was a brilliant learning experience but it wasn’t without its challenges.

Developing something for such a young audience was a particular challenge. We knew, for instance, that we could not assume that children between 3 and 5 could read. For this reason all of the instructions are read out as well as written.  Obviously all text also needed to be very simple and it’s a real discipline sometimes, particularly where you’re trying to convey information about a really interesting historical object.

Why we did it how we did!

There isn’t space here to go into the ins and outs of every decision – let’s just say our first meeting to discuss concepts lasted 5 hours! But I thought it might be interesting to give a little bit of an insight into what we aimed to achieve.

By having two games, we aimed  to provide two different experiences for children – one where they could be creative and do some colouring – Create a Costume, and one where there was more of a ‘right answer’ – Move and Make.

We were careful, however, with Move and Make not to make too much of this ‘right answer’. These are, after all, aimed at very small children and we wanted to stress that it’s just as important to use your imagination and be creative as to get things exactly right. This is also why, at the end of the game, you get to use all of the different elements from across the historical periods to make your own fantastical vehicle or building.

We wanted to use a range of historical periods from across the stories that the Museum of London and the Museum of London Docklands tell.  We also wanted to include links to the galleries that are currently available, but also to items that will be in our new Galleries of Modern London due to open next year.

Enjoy!

We hope you and your children enjoy playing the games! Let us know which bits you like best!

I joined the Learning Department as the e-Learning Officer (Web) at the very end of September 2008.

What is e-Learning?

The best definition I’ve heard of e-Learning is that it’s a learning experience that is significantly enhanced by the use of technology.  This means that you can’t just plonk a copy of a worksheet online and call it e-Learning. Instead there needs to be some element of the experience that technology makes better.

So what do I do as the e-Learning Officer (Web)?
As the ‘brackets web’ part of my job title suggests, I’m responsible for the web side of e-Learning. There’s also an e-Learning Officer (Programmes) who is responsible for integrating other kinds of technology (mp3 players, cameras, video recorders etc) into our learning sessions.

The Museum of London website has a specific section for Learning and the easiest way of summarising my job is to say that I work on that!

About our Learning online section
As I see it, the learning provision on our website does three things:

1. It promotes our learning programmes (for adults and families as well as schools)
2. It is a place for teachers to find resources to use to prepare their visit to the Museum
3. It provides web visitors with the opportunity to have a museum learning experience online i.e. by playing interactive games or reading historical fact packs

Learning Online contains a huge amounts of really valuable information and resources and really fun games.  We’ve had quite a lot of reports, however, that suggest that the way that people find that information could be improved.

My first big task, then, is to rationalise all the content to ensure that it provides the smoothest and easiest ‘user experience’.  At the moment I’m in the process of working out just how to do this!

Another really fun project is the development of two interactive games for under-5 year olds.  These will go on the Learning website and will also be available to use in drop-in sessions in our new Clore Learning Centre which will be opening next year.  This has been a really fun project to plan particularly the part where we explored the CBeebies website for ideas!  We hope to have the games up and running by the end of March 2009.

These are just a couple of examples of the kinds of projects I work on. I hope to continue to blog when other projects get off the ground and the ones I’ve already described develop.