Home » E-Learning Articles » Major museums launch campaign for critical thinking
Major museums launch campaign for critical thinking
~Educators at nine English museums provide learning tools for children
to help them avoid 'cut and paste' ~
EDGWARE, UK, February 25, 2009 /E-Learning PR News/ -- Nine of the UK's leading museums and galleries are helping teachers to develop their pupils' critical thinking skills and encouraging the use of original source material that exists online. These museums, forming the National Museums Online Learning Project, have shared their digitised collections and developed high-quality e-learning resources, which enable interactive lessons and homework projects.
As children from Key Stage 1 are increasingly turning to computers for homework projects and using search engines to gather information, vital research and analysis abilities are being replaced with 'cut and paste' activity. This is most serious when students taking GCSEs, A Levels or even a degree are handing in plagiarised work for assessment. Statistics show 58% of 278 teachers who identified internet plagiarism as a problem said they thought 25% of work returned by pupils included material copied from the internet*. Teachers need safe and secure resources which they can use with their pupils for exploration in the classroom or at home, to exercise their decision-making and critical abilities.
Responding to this need for new and trustworthy material for children, the nine museums have developed a set of high-quality web resources which translate into engaging lessons and homework assignments. The National Museums Online Learning Project is a collaboration between the British Museum, Imperial War Museum, National Portrait Gallery, Natural History Museum, Royal Armouries, Sir John Soane's Museum, Tate, the V&A and The Wallace Collection. The project launches 100 WebQuests at the end of February, which are open-ended investigations that span the collections of these major museums and galleries. WebQuests are written by educators and mapped to the national curriculum at Key Stages 1-4, making learning a journey of discovery. WebQuests encourage pupils to think critically, use their IT skills and directly interact with extraordinary source material. Schools throughout the UK will be able to access the nation's cultural riches in a simple, free and fun to use environment. For some pupils it will be the first time they'll experience the world of history and culture and incorporate information about original artefacts and works of art into their learning projects.
David Anderson, Director of Learning and Interpretation at the V&A, is ambitious about the project's contribution to learning, "Our education system should not just be about ensuring that children leave school with a checklist of skills for employment. It should also be about unlocking their creativity and inspiring them to find their own paths. Self-directed and guided learning can be a valuable part of this - encouraging children to build their own projects and explore areas of interest, as part of their national curriculum work. Reproducing text from a website without understanding the content or interpreting the information doesn't benefit the learner. We hope that teachers and parents will welcome WebQuests as a stimulus to children's thinking."
WebQuests aim to give pupils core skills and also create a rewarding learning experience. Using the nation's cultural heritage encourages students to explore creative resources and original sources in a way that allows them to extend their interests at the same time as following the national curriculum. The federated search that acts as the backbone to WebQuests allows students to access online catalogues from museums and galleries providing support as they work through sometimes complex information on an object. WebQuests teach students that there is often no single 'right answer', and that in researching online, you can find out more if you don't just accept the first few results.
WebQuests are accessible to teachers and parents via the museum partner websites and are complemented with teachers' notes for ideas of how they can be used within lessons.
ENDS
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Notes to Editors
* Survey carried out in December 2007 among ATL union members who teach sixth-formers in schools and Further education colleges in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
The National Museums Online is a highly innovative combined museum collection project, bringing together virtual objects and creative ideas in a way never possible in the physical world.
The consortium of nine museums, led by the V&A, has created an interactive, accessible to all, self-directed, flexible learning resources making use of a wide range of existing original source material online. The project was made possible through funding from HM Treasury from the Invest to Save Programme and cash contributions from the partnering museums. The nine museums and galleries involved are:
British Museum, Imperial War Museum, National Portrait Gallery, Natural History Museum, Royal Armouries, Sir John Soane's Museum, Tate, Victoria and Albert Museum and The Wallace Collection.
WebQuests are hosted on and only available via the partner museum and galleries websites:
The British Museum: www.britishmuseum.org
Imperial War Museum: www.iwm.org.uk
National Portrait Gallery: www.npg.org.uk
Natural History Museum: www.nhm.ac.uk
Royal Armouries: www.royalarmouries.org
Sir John Soane's Museum: www.soane.org.uk
Tate: www.tate.org.uk
Victoria & Albert Museum: www.vam.ac.uk
The Wallace Collection: www.wallacecollection.org
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