One of the great privileges I had growing up in driving distance of a metropolitan area was being able to visit different museums. Not everyone is privileged to be in close proximity to numerous museums, let alone one or two. The World Wide Web makes it possible to visit museums just about anywhere in the world—and there’s no standing in line, or admission charges. Stay as long as you like and go back often to visit. These are some of my favorites and some new discoveries.
NGA Kid’s Zone at the National Gallery of Art. This is a fun site where kids can learn about different art forms and create their own art work. Fun activities teach art concepts. There is also a virtual tour of The Art of Romare Bearden. A student friendly site.
http://www.nga.gov/kids/zone/zone.htm
Museum of Web Art You can take a guided tour of this site to get a glimpse of what’s offered. The focus of this site is Web art rather than traditional art forms. Be sure to stop in the kids wing and see what happens to those dots when you scroll your mouse over them. I want to know how they do that! A student friendly site.
http://www.mowa.org/enter.html and http://www.mowa.org/kids/kids_main.html.
Metropolitan Museum of Art This is a great site to help students develop observation and reasoning skills. This is best suited for students who have good reading skills. A student friendly site.
http://www.metmuseum.org/explore/justforfun.asp
Kids at Art Imagination Factory This is a museum which encourages recycling. It’s a good resource for teachers, scout leaders, parents or anyone else looking for activities which teach about art and encourage recycling as well. A student friendly site.
At the Museum of Modern Art in NY you can go on an art safari to learn about art and animals at the same time or make your own art. On the art safari, you look at and think about what the artwork is telling you. A student friendly site.http://moma.org/momalearning/artsafari/index.html
The Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies is a good resource site for families and teachers with tips and lesson plans. Students can learn about an astronaut’s walk on the moon or Kermit the frog and how he came to be in the Smithsonian collection, and much more. A student friendly site.
http://www.smithsonianeducation.org/students
The Smithsonian Institution has a lot of wonderful locations to visit in person or online. Follow the links you find to go to different museums or to the zoo. Kid’s Castle , presented by Smithsonian Magazine provides a discussion board for kids as well as cool facts of the day. Other links from this site may take you to non-museum sites (a bug activity links to Orkin). A student friendly site.
http://www.si.edu/kids/ http://www.kidscastle.org/
The @rt room is a fun site to visit and has a lot of good activities to help students develop their creative abilities. It has links to kid-friendly museums as well. The future of this site is uncertain, but will be at it’s current location for a while longer.
http://www.arts.ufl.edu/art/rt_room/index.html A student friendly site.
The Hirshhorn Science & Art Museum offers interactive modules—one to learn about sculpture and the other to create sculpture. Drag and drop sculpture is much lighter weight than bronze or marble! The Hirshhorn is also a part of the Smithsonian Institution. A student friendly site.
http://hirshhorn.si.edu/education/interactive.html
The American Museum of Natural History is a mostly text-based site. Illustrations were generally small, but they do have web cam views of the butterfly exhibit. At the time I visited, there were no butterflies in view. All in all, it’s an informative site; one to visit to help plan your actual visit to the museum when you’re in NYC.
The Carnegie Museum of Natural History is renovating its dinosaur exhibit. You can watch on the web cam (you need to reload the page every 30 seconds). If you plan a visit to Pittsburg, dinosaurs almost always capture a child’s imagination, and there’s an interactive exhibit for them to hunt for “fossils.”
http://www.carnegiemuseums.org/cmnh/
The Mariner’s Museum is a good site to visit if you are interested in nautical things. There are many online exhibits of interest. You can view pictures in the gallery, but there are viewing terms you must agree to, forbidding downloading images without permission.
The Louvre—the only way I may ever get to visit this famous museum is online, and I’m glad I can. You can take a virtual tour of different galleries. Images can’t be enlarged, so that is a drawback. Certain parts of the site are only available in French.
http://www.louvre.fr/louvrea.htm
The Cleveland Museum of Art offers online visitors several options. There are art activities to do offline, including an “Egyptomania Coloring Book. Read about and view a history of arms and armo
http://www.clevelandart.org/Kids/
ArtMuseum.net currently has two exhibits, one on the untold history of multimedia and the other on art and technology. This is an online museum; there was no indication of future exhibits. It took me a while to figure out that I needed to move the mouse to find out what was on the page or where to go next. People more “into” these areas would probably get more out of this site than those of us who are not.
Philadelphia Museum of Art offers web exhibits, which for the most part are easy to access. You do need to allow pop-ups for some of the exhibits. The site offers a good variety of things to see and learn about.
http://www.philamuseum.org/exhibitions/webprojects.shtml
The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco site offers allows you to search their images. Clicking on the information gives a larger view and information about the work and the artist. I highly recommend this site, because it allows you to zoom in on the artwork you’re viewing.
The Corning Museum of Glass is one of my favorite museums to visit. You can check out some of the glass collection as well as find out about the exhibits and activities available at the museum, this is a museum best experienced in person.
Austin Museum Partnership in Austin, Texas provides a virtual “whirlwind” tour of the member museums. You can stop and learn a little about each museum; there is a link to each one’s homepage. I didn’t access each of the museums, but think that this is a good planning tool for a visitor. I spent several years in Austin, so couldn’t leave them off my list.
http://www.austinmuseums.org/index.html
Natural History Museums and Collections is an index which provides links to natural history museums and collections world-wide. Not all of the links work, but this can still be a starting place in your search for museums to visit.