The Smithsonian Learning Lab is a great resource that I’ve featured dozen or more times over the years. Later this month the Smithsonian Learning Lab is hosting three free webinars for teachers who want to learn more about how to use it for online and in-person instruction. All of the webinars will be livestreamed on YouTube and you don’t need to to register in advance. The webinars are:

Getting Started: Digital Museum Resources and the Smithsonian Learning Lab – January 13th at 4pm ET
Cultivating Learning: Deconstructing Text with Critical Reading – January 20th at 5pm ET
Creating Collections: Digital Museum Resources and the Smithsonian Learning Lab – January 24th at 5pm ET

What is the Smithsonian Learning Lab?

The Smithsonian Learning Lab allows teachers to create and search for documents, images, videos, interactive animations, and lesson plans from a wide range of Smithsonian-hosted resources. It also lets you create collections to share with others as well as create assignments to give to your students. This video playlist teaches you how to collect, customize, and share collections of resources in the Smithsonian Learning Lab.

Other Smithsonian Resources to Note

Smithsonian Open Access contains more than 2.8 million digital artifacts that you can view and download for free. While the Smithsonian Open Access homepage does have a couple of introductory videos, they’re more promotional than they are instructional. That’s why I created the following short video overview of how to search Smithsonian Open Access.

The Smithsonian has a crowdsourcing project called Smithsonian Digital Volunteers. This project is an effort to transcribe collections of primary sources housed by the Smithsonian. In this short video I demonstrate and explain how you and your students can participate in the projects.