Visit The Morgan Library Online to See the Notes & Sketches of Famous Authors and Artists

The Morgan Library & Museum's online offerings include more than 30 collections of sketches, notes, and photographs from famous authors and artists. One of my favorite collections offered online by The Morgan Library & Museum is Mark Twain: A Skeptic's Progress.

Mark Twain: A Skeptic's Progress is a collection of Twain's handwritten letters, sketches, and story drafts. All twenty-two of those items are displayed in a viewer that will allow you to zoom in and see the detail on each piece of paper. The online exhibit also includes a collection of photographs of Twain at home.

Applications for Education
Before, after, or while they are working their way through Huckleberry Finn or Tom Sawyer have your students explore Mark Twain: A Skeptic's Progress to help them understand Mark Twain's way of thinking and how that influenced his writing.

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.

View Mark Twain's Sketches and More at The Morgan Library & Museum

This afternoon I went on a long session of link chasing that started at this article on Read Write Web and ended at The Morgan Library & Museum's online exhibitions. The Morgan Library & Museum's online exhibitions is comprised of twenty-six online museum displays. One of those displays is Mark Twain: A Skeptic's Progress.

Mark Twain: A Skeptic's Progress is a collection of Twain's handwritten letters, sketches, and story drafts. All twenty-two of those items are displayed in a viewer that will allow you to zoom in and see the detail on each piece of paper. The online exhibit also includes a collection of photographs of Twain at home.

Applications for Education
Want to provide students with a little more detail about Twain's ways of thinking and writing? If so, have them examine the documents in Mark Twain: A Skeptic's Progress. This could be done before, after, or while they are working their way through Huckleberry Finn or Tom Sawyer.

Write Like an Egyptian - Penn Museum Online

Write Like an Egyptian is a part of the online exhibits for kids created by the University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Archeology and Anthropology. Write Like an Egyptian lets students type their names into a box to see what their names would like in Egyptian hieroglyphics. Students can also send Egyptian e-postcards through the museum's website. The rest of the online exhibit provides images from the museum's physical exhibition accompanied by short chunks of information about Pharaohs, Pyramids, and Egyptian artifacts.

Speaking of Egyptians, some of you may remember dancing to this 1980's song from the Bangles.


Applications for Education
Write Like an Egyptian could be a useful addition to an elementary school history lesson. Based on my conversations with elementary school teachers in my district, learning to write their names in hieroglyphics is the kind of thing that elementary school students seem to enjoy showing off to their parents and friends. Students may also enjoy sending home an Egyptian e-postcard to their parents or grandparents.

Here are a couple of related resources that may be on interest to you:
Math + Egyptian History = Good Learning Activity
Art History Via Flickr

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