November Learning: Expanding the Boundaries of Learning

Carrie Kotcho

About Carrie Kotcho
Education Technologist, Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History, Washington, DC

Carrie works with curators, technologists and other educators to integrate new technologies into the Museum’s exhibitions and programs. She manages the Smithsonian’s History Explorer project. The goal of this program is to develop and offer innovative online resources for teaching and learning American History based on the Museum’s collections. The tools, activities and lessons produced are available from both the americanhistory.si.edu and thinkfinity.org Web sites.

Main Session Workshops

Snapshots in Time: Using Flickr to Share Content with the National Museum of American History

Learn how you can use the new resources from the Smithsonian Institute to better understand America’s maritime history. “On the Water” contains stories from Maritime America exhibition. Learn how historians and researchers rely on contemporary accounts of people, places and events and examine multiple perspectives to get an accurate picture of what life was like in the past. As part of this exhibition, the National Museum of American History would like to ask your help in creating a “Snapshot in Time” of American maritime activity today. Maritime activity includes shipping and port-related work, ship and boat building, fishing and fish processing, recreational cruising and many other water-related enterprises, all of which have far-reaching impacts. The foods we eat, the products we buy, how we travel and even the words we speak are all affected by maritime commerce, past and present. Learn how you can use these resources in your classroom. Please bring your own laptop and an image of maritime activity to the session.

History in a Hurry: Online Resources from the National Museum of American History

This session will explore innovative, standards-based online resources for teaching and learning American history, designed and developed by the National Museum of American History as part of Verizon’s thinkfinity.org consortium. Explore the rich resources of the Museum and bring history to life with artifacts, primary sources and online tools for the classroom, after school programs and home.