Dear MCG-ers,
The final 21 objects were added to our ‘Teaching History with 100 Objects’ site (www.teachinghistory100.org) earlier this year and we thought this would be a good opportunity to share some information about the project and our lessons learned from the process. The site is the outcome of the first formal partnership between the Department for Education, the British Museum and 40 museums from across the UK. It uses object-based learning to enable a wide understanding of UK and world history, supporting the history curriculum at KS1, KS2 and KS3. The teaching resources on the site, linked to objects across the country, include high-resolution images, links to video and audio clips and teaching ideas.
Format
The site’s format was inspired by our popular ‘History of the World in 100 Objects’ project and responded to the requirements that the Schools team received from teachers regarding our current website. Via teachers’ panels, anecdotal feedback and other evaluations over the years, teachers have indicated that they want simple, downloadable online resources which can easily be repurposed for their lessons.
Technology
As the museum’s existing CMS is currently nearing end of life, it didn’t make sense to put content into this system and we considered several other open source and commercial CMS packages for the site. We narrowed it down to Umbraco and Expression Engine – the latter won out due to our developer’s existing PHP knowledge and also because we were keen to work with this popular system. Although our experience with EE was positive, the platform proved to be less intuitive than we had expected in some areas.
Management
It was a challenge for us to manage the large number of contributors, sourcing images and navigating copyright issues while maintaining attention to consistency across the site. On the other hand, our decision to stagger the “release” of the objects on the site meant we could launch with only some of the content finalised, allowing us a longer project timeline.
We are proud of the final outcome and believe it provides teachers with valuable teaching resources within a clear, easy-to-navigate experience. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the site – please get in touch with me directly on [log in to unmask] to share any comments.
Best wishes,
Emilia McKenzie
Education Manager (Digital Content)
(Usual working days Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday)
Learning, Volunteers and Audiences
T (UK +44) 020 7323 8459
[log in to unmask]
The British Museum
Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DG
britishmuseum.org
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