For the second year in a row, the Upper School History Department has done a less traditional assessment for their midterm. Both 9th and 10th grade students create virtual museum exhibits that connect a number of artifacts to a central theme covered during the semester like Religion and Trade, Science and Trade, Innovation and Technology, or Nationalism. Each museum also includes an exhibit proposal, object labels and a virtual tour of the artifacts.
History teacher Gini Laffey acquired a great Google slides template by David Lee for the students and David Ahlborn created an annotated example of what should be included for each object label. The library provided LibGuides that highlighted museums and repositories around the world with relavant items for both 9th grade and 10th grade midterms. When history teachers found additional resources for students, these too were added to the LibGuide. All elements and expectations were clearly linked in their assignment, providing easy access for students.
During the two weeks before exams, I visited many of the classes to help students and teachers find images that would help their exhibit. With all grades, I highlighted the curated Image Groups available in ArtStor's Teaching Resources. Our school subscribes to this database, and these Image Groups helped students navigate the thousands of images available from this source.
History teacher Gini Laffey acquired a great Google slides template by David Lee for the students and David Ahlborn created an annotated example of what should be included for each object label. The library provided LibGuides that highlighted museums and repositories around the world with relavant items for both 9th grade and 10th grade midterms. When history teachers found additional resources for students, these too were added to the LibGuide. All elements and expectations were clearly linked in their assignment, providing easy access for students.
During the two weeks before exams, I visited many of the classes to help students and teachers find images that would help their exhibit. With all grades, I highlighted the curated Image Groups available in ArtStor's Teaching Resources. Our school subscribes to this database, and these Image Groups helped students navigate the thousands of images available from this source.
Providing quick tutorials on ways to browse through ArtStor certainly increased student use of the resource, but it also allowed students the opportunity to see real life examples of art curation in action. The practice they were doing as part of their assessment is something very real for historians in museums around the world.
Lucky for today's students, many of those museum experts are making their works available online. MIT's Visualizing Cultures Project, The Morgan Library & Museum Islamic Manuscript Treasures, The Met's Public Domain Collection, and Russia's Photo Archive were just some of the repositories popular with students.
Thanks to the work of these and other institutions, our students are able to create a more visually comprehensive exploration of history.