Category: Educational Partnerships

Leading OER Resource Research Partnership: Smithsonian Learning Lab

Post author By North Navigation
Post date April 24, 2017

For over five years the Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access (SCLDA) has been researching, building, and improving the Smithsonian Learning Lab for educators. But now it is time to hear from the students!

We at Navigation North are proud to be a partner in this exciting venture which brings digitized collections from Smithsonian’s 19 museums, 9 research centers, and the National Zoo into classrooms across the country.

And new resources are being added every day!

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As it currently exists, the Learning Lab was created with input from a variety of classroom teachers. Our leadership team partnered with Smithsonian staff to lead prototyping, along with providing recommendations for metadata and resources structuring.

Not only do we love teacher input on tools we develop for the classroom, but students also need to be heard!

Navigation North VP and Director of Education, Brian Ausland, leading an in-class session with students.

In 2015, SCLDA launched a research project, Understanding the Needs of Student Users of Digital Smithsonian Resources. The goal of this research was to provide additional insight into how digital systems, tools, and content can better align with the needs of student learners.

Last week, members of the SCLDA project team presented an overview of this research at the Museums and the Web Conference in Cleveland, Ohio. The findings from this research are also available on the Learning Lab blog here.

[irp posts=”7638″ name=”Prepare Your Students For Digital Assessments By Using Free Online Resources”]

If you have questions about how to leverage Open Education Resources (OER) or are contemplating a partner for your next EdTech research project, feel free to reach out to our team.

We don’t byte! ;)[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

Digital Learning Design Education Educational Partnerships Open Educational Resources

6 Reasons Teachers Love The Smithsonian Learning Lab

Post author By North Navigation
Post date December 16, 2016

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The Smithsonian Learning Lab provides an online toolkit for teachers to discover Smithsonian’s digital resources and create personalized learning experiences for themselves and others.

Educators can visually explore more than 2 million resources from across the Smithsonian, so it’s easy to find something of interest. The website’s tools enable users to easily organize and customize the resources to make them their own.

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As teachers share their work with others – whether it’s one person, an entire classroom, or the world – the Learning Lab becomes an ever-richer source of knowledge and ideas and a more collaborative community.

Here are six reasons teachers love using the Smithsonian Learning Lab!

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1. Bring millions of Smithsonian resources to your students.

Teachers can help students engage in deep examination of an image by using image annotation. Describe details and highlight notable information from your lesson.

Minimize resource information to just what your students need to know by adding an item to your collection, selecting the information panel, and clicking the description to edit to your liking.

The Hotspot Tool allows you to pinpoint areas on an image or document and provide further information.

2. Digital resources from across Smithsonian in a variety of media formats.

There are now over 2 million digitized resources with new ones being added constantly, including 3D scans which are available for download. Read more about Smithsonian digitalization efforts.

No one is limited to only Smithsonian resources. You can also add resources from your own website, a YouTube video, or any document into your collection for student review.

Check out this 3D replica of Abraham Lincoln.

3. Bring collections to where your students are.

Likewise, instructors can find items from the Smithsonian collection and embed them where learners already like to connect, be that a class website, Google Classroom, Moodle, or other tools.

Embed codes are easily found in the options of the Share button.

This is a collection about the Apollo 11 crew:

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4. Teachers build collections, share resources and expand the Learning Lab.

There are a wealth of resources and activities to introduce students of all ages to the Smithsonian Learning Lab, including over 1,400 collections shared by users and the Smithsonian Staff.

5. Adapting collections for instructor needs is easy.

Using another teacher’s resources for your own is great, but adaptation is even better! If you like a collection another instructor has created, but want to add items such as a quiz, that’s no problem. You can also update the language used to better speak to your own students.

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6. Test Subject-area knowledge and encourage critical thinking.

Assignments and quizzes are a great way to track student engagement with the content you’ve created.

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For more detailed information on getting started with the Learning Lab, click here.

Don’t wait, explore the Smithsonian Learning Lab today!

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Interested in how Navigation North helped develop this educational technology tool?

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Communities of Practice Digital Learning Design Education Educational Partnerships Innovative Instruction Open Educational Resources

Where Exquisite Summer Content Begins to Bloom

Post author By North Navigation
Post date June 28, 2016

The seeds all looked more or less the same as did the work to plant them. Now there are tomatoes, wildflowers, peppers, sunflowers, and corn well on its way. A convergence of exquisite and diverse flora from a common environment of soil and water, experience and effort.

We have been involved in some interesting conversations around what’s working for schools and districts and what’s not. As of right now, we can’t share much more than that however we will offer this. Its always amazing how clear and strong and impassioned the voices become when you start to hear from those close to classrooms who are introducing real solutions. Too often we end up engaged with teams so far outside of that reality that different types of clarity, strength, and passion dominate the conversation. In those instances, people are clearest about their titles, personal opinions run strong, and passion most-readily mirrors profitability.

But this week has been different and refreshing as a garden of sorts suddenly began to take bloom from last year’s efforts.

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Smithsonian Goes Full In

At the nation’s largest EdTech Conference this week, ISTE 2016…we have the satisfaction of watching the database of users quickly close on 5,000 on only the second day of the Smithsonian team’s official launch of the Learning Lab. We look forward to seeing what teachers create when given specially designed access to over a million resources with features specifically for them and the learners they support all over the world. A year of tediously milling over research findings, design schemes, mockups, and UX flowcharts along with the requisite meetings, testing, UI interpretations…finally our latest system breaks soil and begins to sprout.

Here’s what media outlets are saying about it:

The online toolkit allows users to both find and create collections for their lessons by drawing from teaching materials and digitized Smithsonian objects via the “Discover,” “Create” and “Share” tools. (Article) –Education Week

With many teachers emphasizing real-world applications to their lessons, the Smithsonian’s free collection represents a massive database of potential course content and artifacts. (Article) – Education Dive

Molte di queste caratteristiche dei siti sono pensate per rispondere alle necessità di insegnare di insegnanti e di studenti in classi fino ai 12 anni, nell’educazione di più alto livello e in altri ambienti di apprendimento misto. (Article) –Archeomatica

Teachers Design Exquisite Content

While involved in some current research, we overheard this statement during an interview on transitioning from textbooks, “In some real ways, the proliferation of streaming media has provided consumers access to more diverse and exquisite content…teachers and students deserve no less in the classroom.”

Just a few days later, we set about publishing this year’s teacher-developed curricular projects for one of the online programs we support. In reflecting on what we saw, the term exquisite content came to mind over and over again.

One of the activities engages students in deep analyses of immigration through the lens of attitudes, facilities, laws, and induction processes as compared across various eras in America’s history.
Another project asks students to examine the concept of identity through the perspective of personal narrative, social and consumer media, genetics and biology, and culture.
With another team, the work of a Music Production teacher, an English teacher, and a Special Education instructor who shrugged off the traditional, departmentalized disciplinary construct, came together to create an integrated unit where students with special needs work side by side with their peers to create stories based on mutual challenges all students face in life and at school in the form of produced radio broadcasts, professionally mixed and edited and published to NPR.
In yet another, learners use engineering design software combined with plant and soil science and combine it with the study of psychological effects of trauma and PTSD through personal accounts of war to create a local “Healing Garden” for returning veterans and their families in a partnership with local VA services agencies.

The list goes on and on… exquisite all.

[irp posts=”6790″ name=”California’s Blended PD/Curriculum Project Works To Explain Growing Popularity In Other States”]

And now as we watch the number of teacher-authored Learning Collections begin to grow right alongside Smithsonian specialists’ created collections, we get to witness how the new platform will help the Smithsonian realize the formation of a new, authentic, global learning community where teachers’ creativity and learners’ imagination can flourish far beyond the walls of the 19 museums.

Other great Learning Collections

Where there was once soil and sand, there now blooms exquisite content…feel free to wander in and pick what you like.[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

Digital Learning Design Education Educational Partnerships Innovative Instruction Open Educational Resources

Launching the World’s Largest OER Collection… Yeah, That Just Happened.

Post author By North Navigation
Post date November 24, 2015

Perhaps nobody told you, but over 1.35 million objects from the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, 9 major research centers, and the national zoo have been recently released and combined with custom tools to support rich, digital learning around the globe using the largest treasure trove of historical assets in the world.

Somewhere between 9 and 10am EST on a chilly Thursday morning late in October, a year of work culminated with the activation of a new domain. You might not have felt it, but the Smithsonian quietly released the single largest worldwide collection of OER by any one agency in the history of digital resource publishing. And the fun’s just begun.

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. After a year of planning and design headed up by the Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access (SCLDA) with technical design and development led by Navigation North Learning, the Smithsonian Learning Lab was launched.

Three weeks beyond a very hushed “soft-launch”, SCLDA already finds itself managing nearly a 1,000 sessions a day and has over 600 registered users. Amazingly, over 700 private Learning Collections have been created, with over 100 of them now published by teams of Smithsonian educators and various classroom teachers from across the country. With the big, official “PR” launch still months away, many already seem to be finding their way to this new environment. Teachers do talk after all. And it’s no wonder; we worked with SCLDA for two years conducting research with hundreds of top educators and classrooms across the country to design a system where otherwise passive purveyors would now have the freedom to peruse and select their own artifacts and create custom collections focused on specific topics, or designed to teach a certain concept, or explore a given genre, or examine a selected historical era.

Where there was nothing a month ago, there are now fully digitized, engaging, learning experiences as assembled by local teachers, top researchers, and historian/educators alike using artifacts from the Smithsonian’s treasure trove of historical holdings and assets. We are very proud of the contributions we were able to make to the new Smithsonian Learning Lab and look forward to seeing people assemble their own collections, make usable copies of others’, browse through the world’s largest digital repository of materials, or focus on topics as diverse as:

With over a million useful resources available right now, and an aggressive digitization strategy in place targeting another 130 million more records (that is correct, 130 million), the Smithsonian is doing its part. And we’ve done ours as well. When a system blends vast resources with teachers’ immense creativity, learners need just bring their curiosity and a desire for the world’s most comprehensive, richest resources.

Welcome to your Smithsonian Learning Lab.

Sincerely, Navigation North