The Tenement Museum

The Tenement Museum can best be described as an interactive virtual museum. Students select a male or female character for their passport from Europe to Ellis Island. Once at Ellis Island students learn about the process of legal immigration. Eventually students make it to the Orchard Street tenement where they have to choose an occupation as well as make choices regarding living conditions. At the very end of the exhibit, students can write a post card to their friends and family back in Europe. Throughout the journey, students see short video clips featuring "Victoria Confino" who explains to students what they are seeing and reading.

Applications for Education
The Tenement Museum is a great resource for teaching elementary and middle school students about life as an immigrant living in turn-of-the-20th century United States cities.

Museum Box Is a Great Way for Students to Create Virtual Artifact Displays

Museum Box is a great tool for creating virtual displays of artifacts that you find online. Museum Box has been around for a while and I could have sworn that I had written about it before, but a search of my archives revealed that I haven't.

Using Museum Box students can organize images, text, videos, links, and audio clips about any topic that they're researching. When completed , students' "boxes" become digital dioramas.

Adam Bellow at EduTecher put together an excellent museum box tutorial a couple of years ago. I've embedded that video below.


Applications for Education
Museum Box is a great way for students to visually organize all of the information that they have gathered and or created about a particular topic. While the tool was designed with history students in mind, it can certainly be used in other content areas. For example, you could have students in a biology class gather and display virtual artifacts about animals and their habitats.

5 Interesting Virtual Museums and Activities for Students

As field trip budgets are increasingly trimmed at schools everywhere, teachers will need to find some alternative virtual activities for students. Here are five museums that offer excellent virtual tours and activities for students.

The Vatican Museums website hosts a fairly detailed virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel. The tour allows visitors to zoom in on small areas and details of the interior of the Sistine Chapel. Visitors to the virtual tour can turn 360 degrees to view the interior of the Sistine Chapel from various angles.










In addition to the tour of the Sistine Chapel the Vatican Museums host virtual tours of five other places and exhibits. Those tours are the Gregorian Egyptian Museum, the Gregorian Etruscan Museum, Raphael's Rooms, Pinacoteca, and the Ethnological Missionary Museum.

The European Virtual Museum is the product of collaboration between twenty-seven European museums. The European Virtual Museum makes artifacts of European history available in interactive 3D form. Through the use of QuickTime technology the artifacts in the European Virtual Museum can be rotated for optimum viewing. Visitors to the European Virtual Museum can browse through the collections by chronology, geographic area, object type, contributing museum, routes, and tour itineraries.











Tenement Museum is a resource for US History teachers that can best be described as an interactive virtual museum. Students select a male or female character for their passport from Europe to Ellis Island. Once at Ellis Island students learn about the process of legal immigration. Eventually students make it to the Orchard Street tenement where they have to choose an occupation as well as make choices regarding living conditions. At the very end of the exhibit, students can write a post card to their friends and family back in Europe. Throughout the journey, students see short video clips featuring "Victoria Confino" who explains to students what they are seeing and reading.



The JFK Presidential Library and Museum website has four interactive exhibits for learning about John F. Kennedy and his presidency. We Choose the Moon (a resource I reviewed over a couple of years ago) is an interactive exploration of the Apollo 11 mission. The site covers everything from Kennedy's first proclamation that the US would put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960's to the moon landing itself.

The White House Diary is an interactive flipbook of Kennedy's schedule while in office. You can flip through it page by page to see what he did on each day or pick a specific date from the calendar. Many of the pages include video clips and or images from that day.

The JFK Timeline is an interactive timeline Kennedy's presidency. The timeline features cultural and world events as well as US political events.

Finally, the Virtual JFK Museum Tour takes you to view exhibits and artifacts in the museum. The tour is narrated and in some cases you hear Kennedy's voice. The tour is divided into major themes and events of Kennedy's presidency including his campaign, the Peace Corps, and the Space Race. The tour also includes some information about Bobby Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy.

The Museum of Obsolete Objects is a neat YouTube channel featuring videos about objects like cassette tapes that at one point represented cutting edge technology and are now obsolete. The MOOO isn't limited to 20th Century objects. The list includes things like quill pens and the telegraph. I've embedded the telegraph video below.

Tour the Sistine Chapel Online

Most of my students will not visit the Sistine Chapel anytime in the foreseeable future, but that doesn't mean they can't explore the frescoes and paintings of the Sistine Chapel. The Vatican Museums website hosts a fairly detailed virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel. The tour allows visitors to zoom in on small areas and details of the interior of the Sistine Chapel. Visitors to the virtual tour can turn 360 degrees to view the interior of the Sistine Chapel from various angles.










In addition to the tour of the Sistine Chapel the Vatican Museums host virtual tours of five other places and exhibits. Those tours are the Gregorian Egyptian Museum, the Gregorian Etruscan Museum, Raphael's Rooms, Pinacoteca, and the Ethnological Missionary Museum.

Open Culture provided me with the lead on these virtual tours.

Applications for Education
You could search the Internet and find many of the images that are seen in these virtual tours. However, the virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel allows students to explore at their own pace. Students using the virtual tour can zoom-in on images to gain a better view of the details than they would find in most images on the web.

Here are some related items that may be of interest to you:
ArtsEdge - Podcasts and Lesson Plans
Blogs for Art Teachers
The Bayeux Tapestry Animated

European Virtual Museum - 3D, Interactive Artifacts

The European Virtual Museum is the product of collaboration between twenty-seven European museums. The European Virtual Museum makes artifacts of European history available in interactive 3D form. Through the use of QuickTime technology the artifacts in the European Virtual Museum can be rotated for optimum viewing. Visitors to the European Virtual Museum can browse through the collections by chronology, geographic area, object type, contributing museum, routes, and tour itineraries.












Applications for Education
The interactive 3D objects in the European Virtual Museum are a great improvement over simple static images of artifacts. For example, rather than looking at only a portion of this artifact, students can view all of the engraving on it.

Here are some related items that may be of interest to you:
The Bayeux Tapestry Animated
Timelines TV - British and American History Videos
Ancient Web - The Ancient World's Great Civilizations

The Forward Thinking Museum - Virtual Museum

The Forward Thinking Museum is a virtual art museum containing more than 100 exhibitions and videos. Visitors can view image exhibitions or watch video exhibitions. The content ranges from subjects such as wildlife to architecture to people at work. The Forward Thinking Museum could keep you occupied for hours as you explore all of the exhibits. Visitors navigate through the Forward Thinking Museum by using their mouse or keyboard arrow keys.

Applications for Education
The Forward Thinking Museum could be a great resource for art teachers and art students. The museum could be used as an introduction to photography and videography styles. The Forward Thinking Museum could also be used as the centerpiece of a pairing and sharing activity.