Dive Brief:
- Teachers can now access multimedia resources from the Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access through an easier-to-navigate, free Learning Lab website, according to a blog post from Education Week.
- The Smithsonian Learning Lab launched following a five-year development process that brought together digitized collections, education resources and videos that were previously spread across different online locations.
- Teachers and other users can use “discover,” “create” and “share” tools to find resources for lesson plans, create annotations, quizzes, assignments and interactive learning activities, and then share them so the Smithsonian and other teachers can build off of custom collections.
Dive Insight:
The Smithsonian has more than 1 million digital resources and continues to digitize more content to add to the online platform. It also created a number of tutorials for new users still learning how to navigate the Learning Lab system.
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. And, as such a large collection could be daunting, the Learning Lab features staff picks as a smaller, curated portion of resources. Many students will never make it to one of the Smithsonian’s museums in Washington, D.C. The Learning Lab helps teachers bring those resources to them.
