SUMMARY

Issue for Discussion

The Office of Cultural Education, consisting of the State Museum, State Archives, State Library and Office of Public Broadcasting/Educational Television, has content that can be used by teachers to enhance and expand the curriculum and bring life to learning.  Creative use of technology makes it possible to capture and deliver this content to teachers and students, but our Department has yet to embrace the potential that this content has to enliven and ignite the learning environment and the increasing variety of technological possibilities for getting this content into the hands of students and teachers.

Proposed Handling

The Regents will discuss how the programs of OCE can harness and use modern technology to make the rich content of our collections available to teachers and students and help them incorporate this content into their lessons. Kristi Fragnoli, Associate Professor of Education at the College of St. Rose and an ardent advocate for use of primary materials in the classroom, will talk to the Regents about how teachers employ these materials and her efforts to ensure that pre-service teachers master their uses before entering the classroom. 

Background Information

The OCE Digital Collections are an excellent example of a virtual collection of images, delivered over the Internet, which supports a wide array of classroom or extracurricular lessons.  As well, New York’s PBS stations create and make available video materials on an almost endless set of topics for teachers to use in the classroom.  OCE has also begun to investigate the utility of social media sites, much in vogue with today’s students and life-long learners, to deliver additional content to users.  Research into the use of Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and a variety of other online services is ongoing in OCE.  Museum and Archives YouTube and Facebook sites are already getting significant attention from the public, including teachers.

Recommendation

That the Regents support efforts to increase digital content from OCE collections and to improve and expand the methods by which that content is delivered to students, teachers and the public for a wide variety of educational endeavors through use of the most efficient, effective and widely used technological vehicles.