Mobile Learning Institute @ Postal Museum

By Kim Skerritt, Mobile Learning Program Assistant & Jeff Meade, Mobile Learning Program Lead

Greetings from the Mobile Learning Institute at the National Postal Museum! We want to catch you up on what we have been doing for the past few months. The Mobile Learning Institute, fondly simplified to MLI, is a new partnership with the Pearson Foundation. We provide educator workshops that integrate new media and Smithsonian collections into classrooms. We promote a change in teaching philosophy that focuses on the students as drivers of the content. They need to be problem-solvers, creators, communicators, and collaborators in order to succeed in the 21st Century. We challenge our teachers to take on those roles as well. Last summer, we worked with more than 50 educators from all over the nation. This year we are partnering with seven school and 30 teachers in the DC metro area.

So what does new media look like in a museum? This is one of the big questions we are trying to address, but there are others too: what does “learning” in a museum really mean? Can a social learning environment like a museum be a destination for increasing new media skills? How can museums support schools that do not have up to speed technology or limitations of use? Follow us as we try to find the answers to these questions!