The FAPE Site

Virtual Museums - Fresh Materials and Perspectives

Students enjoy these unique learning tools.

American Memory Project | Library of Congress
This rich collection of primary source material from the Library of Congress incorporates documents, audio, video, maps, and photographs into forty online exhibitions. Here you'll find information on everything from the Civil War to vaudeville to folk music to the Great Depression. This is a great resource for secondary level social studies and literature classes.
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/

American Museum of Natural History
Take a coral reef adventure, explore the history of chocolate, or view rare and unique photos of the moon. OLogy, a special site for young learners, offers a chance to learn about whatever students are interested in. Whether they're fascinated by spiders (arachnology), erupting with joy for volcanoes (volcanology), or being wowed by planets and stars (astronomy), they'll find everything they need on this Web site.
http://www.amnh.org
http://ology.amnh.org/?

The British Museum
Search the online database for information on over 5,000 objects, or take a Guided Tour of specific collections. A special area for children provides age-appropriate resources for young learners. Each month the museum sponsors a competition in which students enter for a chance to see their work displayed on the museum Web site. Teachers and students may also send questions to museum curators (allow 2 weeks for responses). Teachers may find the "curriculum search" especially useful; it can be used to locate Online Tours covering a variety of subjects and topics. The Tours offer self-contained, thorough explorations of each subject area, with accompanying worksheets and online activities for a range of abilities, including provision for special needs students. Tours also include examples of children's work, animations, web links and reading lists.
http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/

Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum
This Web site features more than 10,000 files with a terrific online library of more than 2000 19th century pictures, maps and descriptions of railroad construction and travel. It tells the story of the Pacific Railroad in human terms with lots of exhibits and first person accounts. It also has a simulation game for elementary students called The Great Railroad Race.
http://cprr.org/Museum/index.html

China the Beautiful
This virtual museum offers rich media on subjects such as the Beijing Opera, calligraphy, dragons, emperors, New Year, and Zen Buddhism. Online tools include discussion boards, dictionaries, flash cards, tips for learning Chinese, and maps.
http://www.chinapage.org/china.html

The Exploratorium
The Exploratorium is a museum of science, art, and human perception located in San Francisco, California. Online since 1993, the Exploratorium was one of the first science museums to build a site on the World Wide Web. Included in the site are more than 12,000 Web pages and many sound and video files, exploring hundreds of different topics. The site contains instructions for over 500 simple experiments, all of which may be viewed on any type of Web browser, with even the slowest connection, and easily printed out.  A variety of online exhibits are also available, all of which are patterned after real exhibits on the museum floor. Occasionally, the online version provides a richer experience than its physical counterparts.
http://www.exploratorium.edu

The Field Museum
Named after its principal benefactor (Marshal Field) and dedicated to preserving and showcasing objects that illustrate natural history, the Field Museum Web site is home to dozens of online exhibits that provide students with rich sources of information on everything from Tyrannosaurus rex to butterflies, and African artworks to prominent female scientists.
http://www.fmnh.org

The Museum of Tolerance
This is a high tech, hands-on experiential museum that focuses on two central themes through unique interactive exhibits: the dynamics of racism and prejudice in America and the history of the Holocaust. The Museum, the educational arm of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, was founded to challenge visitors to confront bigotry and racism, and to understand the Holocaust in both historic and contemporary contexts.
http://www.museumoftolerance.com/

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Presenting the Visual Timeline
An interactive, animated compendium of rock and popular music history. Discover unexpected connections between artists. Track the growth of a musical movement. Zoom in on the day the Beatles invaded America, or out to a bird's-eye view of the blues' sweeping influence. (Requires Shockwave player.)
http://www.rockhall.com/timeline/

The Smithsonian Institution
This online companion to the world's largest museum complex provides access to thousands of free resources on American history and culture, natural history, air and space travel, fine arts, and more. Each Smithsonian museum (National Portrait Gallery, Natural History, etc.) has its own Web site, as do each of the Smithsonian's publications (including magazines, books, images and records). Special sections of the Web site are devoted to teachers and students, where curriculum resources can be searched by subject area, grade level, and resource type (e.g., lesson plans, Web sites, field trips), and where students will find fun games and activities, as well as kid-friendly information and articles.
http://www.si.edu

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
This multimedia companion to the physical museum holds personal histories of holocaust victims, survivor testimonies, artifacts, music, photographs, historical films and documents, maps, and animated maps. The museum has many resources for teachers, including tips on instructional strategies; teaching materials and resources; and, information on professional development, online workshops, and planning for visits.
http://www.ushmm.org