Engaging Students with Technology

I’m Jeff Meade, the School and Tours Coordinator at the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum. I spend quite a bit of time leading tours through the museum, turning students into airmail planes and letter carriers and Pony Express riders and things like that. Museum education intrigues me but leaves me wondering about some pretty big questions. First, how effective are my offbeat, even wacky, lessons, and two, can some of the ideas I use on the museum floor translate to classrooms all over the country? I’ll try and tackle both of those questions in promoting dialogue about Climate Change.

The Smithsonian National Postal Museum’s central exhibit tells the story of how the mail moves— by plane, train, truck, and even dog sled!

I have found that collections relating to our natural and built environments often create a call for action, especially when we discuss topics like climate change with our audiences. Because there is no specific answer to what we should or should not do to address such an issue, I think it opens the door for creative engagement strategies like those I use at the Postal Museum. Climate change as a topic lends itself quite well to interpretation strategies I promote at the Postal Museum, mainly because there is no specific answer on what we should or should not do. In terms of tour strategy, lacking specific answers opens the door for creative engagement. Learning strategies I employ on tours, for students of all ages, encourage artistic, musical and theatrical interpretations. As wacky as they might first appear, these strategies encourage multiple ways to understand our themes and promote multi-sensory learning moments. Seriously, students are always taking in information, but do we as educators really provide enough creative outlets for them to interpret back to us what they know?

The next question is, how do we engage classrooms that are not able to physically come in and work with us? The online conference format is a great opportunity, and one that I’ve participated in before. I led a session called Stamp Stories for the first Smithsonian Education Online Conference on the life and presidency of Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln holds the unique honor of being our only president who was also a postmaster, and the variety of stamps depicting images of President Lincoln is almost limitless. In my session, students participated in a chat-room format to interpret how and why collections of Lincoln-themed stamp images related to each other. This experience proved to me that using exciting technology works wonders in making Smithsonian collections accessible outside of our museums. I’m not advocating not visiting the museums, but at least we can work together with schools through engaging technology.

Families enjoy a festival at the Postal Museum, making connections between philately and postal history.

In the Climate Change Conference Exhibit Hall, the Postal Museum features an exciting program for teens called Green Ways to Move the Mail. Believe it or not, the Postal Service is using cutting-edge technology to deliver the mountains of mail we still send to each other. By telling this story, the Postal Museum is well suited to engage students in the climate change topic.

I want to conclude this initial post with some questions for potential participants:

First, can interpretation techniques used in museums encourage creative lesson plans in classrooms on topics like climate change?

Second, can we bring Smithsonian educators and their collections into classrooms all over the country and even all over the world using neat and engaging technology?

I think we can!

Jeff Meade is School and Tours Coordinator at the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum.