If you could put a number of items into a box that described your life, what would you include? What do you think would be included if you were a Victorian Servant or Queen Elizabeth I.
If you lived during the English Civil War, what items would you include to make a case for, or against, the parliamentarians? And what if you want to persuade people to a particular point of view – what evidence would you present?
Museumbox is tool which can help pupils build up an argument related to a specific issue or pull together digital resources - images, video clips, audio clips, Word documents, text files, spreadsheets, weblinks etc to answer a specific enquiry. They can then present the results in a unique way.
5 Ways to use MuseumBox
Mathematics: pupils could use the MuseumBox tools to present what they know about triangles and specifically to answer the enquiry question, "How do we know that the three angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees?"
Examples from St Louis School, Bury St Edmunds can be seen here: http://discoverybox.e2bn.org/gallery/index.php?org=42 English:
Supporting less able writers – use Museumbox to help students structure writing through the use of paragraphs.
- Each face of a cube represents one sentence
- Each cube (so up to six sentences or faces) represents a paragraph.
- A box with three layers and one cube per layer is a piece of writing with a beginning, a middle and an end
English: Building and presenting an argument: English groups in years 7 and 8 have been working to develop their skills of building and presenting an argument. The focus of their work was the question, "Are humans cruel to animals?" The pupils researched articles found both in print media and on the internet, accessed galleries of images to support their points, created their own presentations and documents and made links to relevant websites.
Science: use for writing up a science investigation
- First cube what we what to find, equipment (upload a photograph of the equipment and write a list), prediction (hypothesis), method, safety considerations.
- Second cube is about what happened; the results so might include a table of results, a graph based on the results, a photograph of the investigation, a written description of what happened.
- Third cube: Conclusions – what the results show, if/how they match our prediction (hypothesis), why our results and our hypothesis are different, evaluation of the investigation.
History: Investigate one decade of the 20th century Use 8 cubes one for each aspect of the decade: entertainment, music, economy, politics, technology, fashion... include images, sound recordings and text – a nice example can be seen here: http://museumbox.e2bn.org/creator/viewer/show/131279
Register to use Museumbox here: http://creator.museumbox.e2bn.org/