We're off to the Museum...

Diprotodon - Victoria's Megafauna

Today I had the privileged of joining Learning Team 3 from Findon Primary School on a visit to the Melbourne Museum. Whilst I had attended an excursion a couple of times in the past, this was the first one that involved visiting a specific venue.

The Museum had things down pat - they had things figure out and their systems and processes enabled a fairly stress free day for the teachers (apart from trying to supervise 5 classes of grade three students:)). The visit gave me some great ideas for how to improve some of the processes we have in place at the Wildlife Sanctuary.

Students on the Forest Walk

The students had a great time exploring all the exhibits from the Melbourne Gallery, were students explore Mellbourne's history, including an old shack and Phar Lap, to the Forest Gallery, where live exhibits engaged students in understanding frogs, lizards and forest plants, to the Science and Life Gallery where evolution, dinosaurs and wildlife were on display.

Something I noticed was the way in which students engaged with the technology in various exhibits. Whilst interpretation experts would tout their educational benefit, I noticed in so

Students exploring the Dinosaur exhibit

me exhibits that this was a very surface level of education and in fact bordered on students being more engaged with the interactivity than the information presented. One particular instance was when students were fighting over looking at a virtual display of animals. pressing screen images that would provide information about the animals - at no point did students pay any attention to the content, even when it directly linked to questions in their worksheets (they had to have the exact section of information pointed out to them). At this time I asked the students what they were looking at - they explained - 'just random animals'. They were amazed and excited, when I pointed out the animals on display (above the screen) and were then actively engaged in looking at what was around them - rather than the screen. I feel if the screen wasn't there, they'd have had a more interactive learning experience.