Distance Learning Scenario

Scenario-A high school history teacher, located on the west coast of the United States, wants to showcase to her students new exhibits being held at two prominent New York City museums. The teacher wants her students to take a "tour" of the museums and be able to interact with the museum curators, as well as see the art work on display. Afterward, the teacher would like to choose two pieces of artwork from each exhibit and have the students participate in a group critique of the individual work of art. As a novice of distance learning and distance learning technologies, the teacher turned to the school district’s instructional designer for assistance. In the role of the instructional designer, what distance learning technologies would you suggest the teacher use to provide the best learning experience for her students?


To help the history teacher out with this project the technologies that I would suggest would be an interactive tour and a web-quest. After the teacher has introduced the lesson, she could build a web-quest for her students. (see below) A web-quest is similar to a worksheet that is solved by going to various websites to locate the answer. A web-quest can easily be made, differentiated, and completed with basic computers. Even if the teacher is not familiar or unsure about making a web-quest, a very simple search using Google or Bing (see below)can deliver thousands of examples or ones that other teachers have used. I have personally used and created many web-quests and the students enjoy them.

Once the web-quest is complete she could send her students on an interactive tour of the museum. Since she wants to have her students interact with the museum curators setting up a webcam or Skype would allow them to have real-time conversations. Another option to have synchronous communication would be to setup a discussion board where the students could log on and post comments to the curators to comment back. Using the http://www.metmuseum.org/explore/museumkids.asp will take her students to the museum’s main page(see below). While in communication with the curator, the students could navigate the museum, pausing for questions and still seeing the major exhibits without leaving their classroom.

A more self guided tour would use http://www.moma.org/interactives/destination/# will actually take her students to the museum of modern art in New York City. The tour is animated, yet has the abilities to focus on pieces of art. From this site she could assign various paintings for her students to discuss or even have activities with (see below). This site allows the students to use other intelligences to examine and manipulate the paintings, while learning about the pieces of art. With some practice, trial and error the teacher should become more familiar with using the technologies to enhance her lessons.