In the classroom today, it is important to provide students with meaningful activities that actively engage them with material and provide connections to their outside lives and interests. Many new applications that capitalize on creativity and student-based learning are being created and implemented within the schools in an attempt to revise the more traditional approaches to instruction. Museum Box is an example of one interactive tool that allows students to compile information from various sources into a virtual box in order to formulate an argument, or overview of a specific topic, and present it in an organized manner. It is a relatively new Web 2.0 tool that is beginning to gain credibility in the classroom due to the creativity that it allows students to incorporate into class projects.

Information that students can include in their projects range from text and images to audio and video files. All materials that support the perspective, or add to a particular description, are arranged on various sides of a virtual cube. Each cube serves as part of the overall idea, represented by the box itself, which holds multiple layers of cubes. Although the appeal of this construction-based project is immediately clear with regard to the History and English content areas, which emphasize the importance of building arguments and backing them up with various sources, it can also serve as a useful supplement to units within other subject areas as well.

With a couple of structural variations, Museum Box can be utilized as a project in a Foreign Language classroom setting. It is particularly useful for lower level classes, such as Spanish 1, because it provides students with meaningful vocabulary interactions and helps build a strong basis for target language development by allowing students to reinforce classroom information with concrete examples that they themselves have designed. Having the opportunity to present to classmates at the end of the unit also gives students a reason to work hard at creating a final product that they can be proud of and look forward to presenting to their peers.

Creating a Museum Box involves three important overarching steps: gathering information, forming layers, and filling in cubes. The most important step, of course, is actually gathering all of the information necessary to put together the presentation. For Spanish 1 students doing a presentation about their childhood, they could find pictures, home videos, links to their elementary school website, etc. The point in this step is to collect all of the evidence that could possibly go into the presentation and then dwindle it down to the most meaningful and most important information.

The next step, forming layers, involves deciding the number of factors and the depth of each; or in other words, the relationship between information that the student wishes to convey. One student may choose to touch on 8 different childhood memories and only go down one additional layer for each, discussing why they were enjoyable; whereas another may choose only four, but decide to go down two layers, using the first to talk about the importance of the activity, and the second to connect it further and discuss what other activities may have spawned from the involvement with the first (e.g. maybe playing a sport as a kid eventually sparked the student to join the middle school team).

Lastly, students must fill in each cube with the information that they gathered in the first step. For the student who played a sport in school, perhaps they may add an image of the team mascot, a link to the team website, a video clip of a game that was played, and a text file describing, in the target language, why the experience was important. Another student who joined girlscouts may have a picture of her troop, an audio recitation of the motto, a link to the website, and a video of herself recounting a best memory in the target language. The possibilities are endless, but it is important to keep in mind that the activity always has to relate back to the content in some way.

The following webpages describe the basic procedures for creating a Museum Box, and provide some useful project ideas that teachers can adapt, adjust, and incorporate into their own discipline:

Making a Museum Box

http://www.p12.nysed.gov/nysatl/English/museum/html/2.html

Technology Tip:

www.evscicats.com/elearning/docs/techtips/ museum - box .docx

The key to effectively implementing a Museum Box project is to make sure that it connects back to the classroom in a meaningful way, so that students can tie the experience of creating the boxes to the information that they are learning. Most classroom examples of Museum Box are perspective based, in the sense that they serve the purpose of developuing an argument or point of view. There are not many examples, however, of student-centered boxes, as in boxes that students create about themselves.

One of the best way for students to learn a foreign language is to be exposed to the information in a way that makes it personal. Students best retain the information that is presented in a familiar context. To enhance this process, Spanish students could create a box about their families or the community in which they grew up. By placing themselves at the center and adding blocks that relate to family members, activities, influences, etc. students are able to quickly and effectively learn the vocabulary because it relates directly to their life.

Hardwick Middle School

Students in a Hardwick Middle School classroom completed a projected in they took on the role of a myth buster, finding evidence to determine whether or not various myths about Angl-Saxons were indeed true. Museum Box mainly served as an organizational tool for this project. Students could have easily written a paper or made a visual presentation, but using Museum Box also allowed them to incorporate non-text files. Each myth takes up one cube, and the faces on the cubes hold the evidence that was found in support of or against the myth until enough was gathered to determine validity.

http://museumbox.e2bn.org/creator/viewer/show/37249

http://museumbox.e2bn.org/creator/viewer/show/37896