Virtual Museum

A virtual museum is a collection of electronic artifacts and information resources about a topic- virtually anything that can be digitized. The collection may include paintings, drawings, photographs, diagrams, graphs, recordings, video segments, newspaper articles, transcripts of interviews, numerical databases and a host of other items which may be saved.

Any application like Microsoft Word, Powerpoint, or a web page may be used to create the virtual museum. The museum may also offer pointers to great resources around the world relevant to the museum's main focus.

Much of the material housed in a virtual museum may be generated and produced by students who conduct research on the topic within their own community and the global community, engaging in an electronic treasure hunt to find great information and electronic artifacts. Because students are actually building meaning as they add to the museum collection, this is, in many respects, a wonderful example for constructivist learning.

Besides the locally collected information resources, the virtual museum may also point the visitor to the best-related resources that can be found on the Internet. Museums are also fine vehicles for multidisciplinary studies, as the collection may include everything from music and art to science and politics and mathematics.

Virtual museums offer multi-sensory opportunities appealing to a variety of learning styles and multiple intelligences and have great advantages over textbooks, bringing vitality, color and motion to student exploration.

The following sites are examples of virtual museums:

Ancient Egypt Virtual Museum
http://www.lakelandschools.org/lt/Museum/lobby.html

Museum of Snacks
http://www.halfhollowhills.k12.ny.us/page.cfm?p=206

The Virtual Museum of Music Inventions
http://www.musicinventions.org/

Museum of Photography
http://www.photographymuseum.com

Peace Museum
http://www.ih.k12.oh.us/ps/peace/mainpage.htm

Ellis Island (student created)
http://wwwald.bham.wednet.edu/museum/museum.htm