CFF Communities

Welcome to this collaboration between the Classroom of the Future Foundation and the USS Midway Aircraft Carrier Museum.  Use this link for more information on the education programs at the Midway museum.

The museum seeks to expand their classroom resources from the existing 4 classrooms to add perhaps 6 more classrooms.  As well, the education programs at the museum are seeking to incorporate more modern technologies that will help their mission of educating San Diego school children in on-board lessons that address math, science and social studies standards.

We plan to use the CFF Communities discussion forum to document the collaboration as we progress towards more complete specifications and project plans.

The best way to keep informed is to "subscribe" to this discussion forum.  This will cause the CFF Communities server to send you an email whenever new information is posted.  Here's how.  Click on the Forums link in the menu line above (the one with Home, Blogs, Forums, ...).  Look for the Shortcuts panel on the right and click on Forum Subscriptions.  You will get a list of discussion forums, so look for the Midway Classrooms of the Future forum and in the Subscribe column, turn the No to a Yes by clicking on the word.

We are all excited about using innovative instructional practices to model how educational technology can make a difference in getting students excited and helping them achieve their own success in learning.

Cheers
Rick

The below websites are all good examples of ways to engage students beyond the actual Midway tour.

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ - Notice on the bottom right there is an Educator's resource area. When you click on Classroom Resources, there are some great ways for teachers to expand classroom learning. But also, on that Classroom Resource page, there is a Kids link (on the left). Having different pages for teachers and students is a great way to expand learning beyond the tour.

http://www.si.edu/ Smithsonian also has sections (on the left) for teachers and students. Their educator section is so robust, with a seachable lesson plan bank. Remember when we discussed having teachers submit lessons? They could be part of this searchable database idea. They also have a neat "family" link, which pulls in the entire community of learners.

The Field Museum in Chicago has a great section for virtual experiences: http://www.fieldmuseum.org/education/online_learn.htm Again, a great way to extend the learning beyond the 45 minutes, or 2 hours. Teachers can use these as pre or post activities.

Someone mentioned, I think, Discovery Education. Although the site has a ton of resources (http://school.discoveryeducation.com/) I dont think the site is a good model for what the Midway is trying to create. It's a plethora of activities, worksheets, and interactive elements. But maybe it would make for a good partner to be able to pull some of their resources, or joint-development of projects down the road.

When we talk about how to present topics via online learning, it needs to be simple because there may be teachers who aren't real confident in the topic. We have some teachers who use lessons similar to this one: http://www.thetech.org/exhibits/online/topics/12a.html It's a lot of text, yes, but it has some graphical interface and helps the teacher present the information to the class, even if they aren't a subject-matter expert.

Did I promise to share anything else? I can't recall. Just let me know.

Laura

You mentioned the Discovery Education as a resource and it turns out that there were stories about the USS Midway on the History Channel as well as on Discovery Channnel.  Maybe we could get the Midway educators to use these resources of make them available for use by teachers. 

Bruce,

 It would seem to me that there is a potential for a partnership here. The USS Midway should be able to get usage rights for any/all materials about themselves, especially since it is for educational use. Hmm.... it would not only benefit students learning about the USS Midway, but it would show teachers and district personnel the power of Discovery Education.

Good point and we should pursue this idea in early January 2009.  Also, there are a couple of books on the USS Midway, Midway Magic and Midway Memories by Scott McGaugh who is a consultant for CFF (he authors the CFF Synergies eNewsletter) and he may be willing to share some photos and text in a digital format for use by teachers and students.