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"Earlier this year, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York, visitors paraded through the fifth floor to see a retrospective dedicated to the abstract expressionist Frank Stella. Although many of the works on display were four or five decades old, in some ways the show felt tailor-made for the Instagram age: a riot of vibrant colors and textures, 20-foot-long reliefs, and sculptures as jagged and dynamic as 3-D graffiti. Visitors one busy Saturday afternoon stopped in front of artworks, lined up shots on their phones, snapped a few photos, and then moved on to the next piece. Some paused briefly to consider a particular painting; more stared down at their screens, furiously filtering. Few noticed an elderly gentleman sitting on a bench in one of the smaller rooms, watching the crowd engage with his work. The only visitor in the gallery not clutching a phone was Stella himself. Museum directors are grappling with how technology has changed the ways people engage with exhibits. But instead of fighting it, some institutions are using technology to convince the public that, far from becoming obsolete, museums are more vital than ever before. Here's what those efforts look like."

"Last week, Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, announced more than 400,000 high-resolution digital images of public domain works in the Museum's world-renowned collection may be downloaded directly from the Museum's website for non-commercial use-including in scholarly publications in any media-without permission from the Museum and without a fee. The number of available images will increase as new digital files are added on a regular basis."

Many museums are experimenting with "back channel" platforms that allow visitors and staff to chat and share content while onsite at the museum

"You could pay $118 on Amazon for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's catalog The Art of Illumination: The Limbourg Brothers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry. Or you could pay $0 to download it at MetPublications, the site offering "five decades of Met Museum publications on art history available to read, download, and/or search for free." If that strikes you as an obvious choice, prepare to spend some serious time browsing MetPublications' collection of free art books and catalogs."

"You're spending an afternoon browsing the exhibits at an art museum. If you're anything like me, you'd probably appreciate the art a lot more if you could bring someone along that could explain the history and nuances of the pieces on display. Now imagine pointing a device at the painting and seeing it morph into a dynamic video giving you all the information you wanted about the art. Welcome to augmented reality. Virtual reality replaces the real world with an artificial, digital environment. In contrast, augmented reality alters your view of the real world by layering it with associated digital information. Augmented reality uses your device's camera to view the immediate environment and display media when it sees an object it recognizes. It has been utilized as a marketing and informational tool by many industries. Using an augmented reality app, you can point your device at an advertisement in a magazine and get detailed product demonstrations. Aim it at a sign outside a house for sale and get an after hours virtual walk-through the property. There are also many ways augmented reality can be used in education."

"The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum announces the release of the Guggenheim iPad app, which offers a unique exploratory experience from anywhere in the world. The free app is available to download at guggenheim.org/app. An extension of the existing Guggenheim app for iPhones and Android handsets, the new iPad app brings together a rich array of content highlighting the museum's collections and exhibitions as well as its publications archive, offering access to more than 100 out-of-print titles dating back to the 1930s. "

"The American Museum of Natural History's (AMNH) research library last month hosted the official launch of its new online image database for Digital Special Collections. Begun as a project to digitize 1,000 of the museum's photos and rare book illustrations using grant funding from the New York Metropolitan Library Council, the Digital Special Collections program has evolved into a long-term project that will offer the public free online access to the museum's research library collection. The new database includes more than 7,000 archival images that document the Museum's efforts in New York and around the world, dating back to scientific expeditions from the 19th century."

"Museums and galleries may be our first port of call when visiting a new city or planning a class field trip, but they are often overlooked when it comes to their digital offerings. What tends to happen when searching for digital resources is that we focus on digital search techniques, meaning we easily miss some of the best resources created by real world institutions. These days many great galleries, museums, memorials and world famous locations want to share their mystery and wonder beyond their physical walls, and with that comes a world of free teaching resources. For students, this connection between the real word and their study not only helps cement knowledge, it can also help foster the lifelong learning we all hope to encourage in our students"

"How to find the best examples? Ideally, they'll catch you by surprise in their natural urban environment, but you can't be in every urban environment at once. Hence Google Street Art, the virtual museum we featured last year. Since then Google Street Art introduced another innovation: the ability to behold some of their 10,000 collected pieces in "museum view.""

"Organized by the New York Academy of Medicine Library, #ColorOurCollections returns next week. From February 6th through February 10th, you and your students/community will be able to discover, download, print and color pages shared by more than 200 libraries, museums and special collections from around the world-among them: Biodiversity Heritage Library, Bodleian Libraries, Cambridge University Digital Library, Europeana, Medical Heritage Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Library of Medicine, and New York Public Library"

"In New Haven, Connecticut, where I live with my husband and two sons, we are lucky to have nearby the Eli Whitney Museum. This place is the opposite of a please don't touch repository of fine art. It's an "experimental learning workshop" where kids engage in an essential but increasingly rare activity: they make stuff. Right now, looking around my living room, I can see lots of the stuff made there by my older son: a model ship that can move around in water with the aid of a battery-powered motor he put together; a "camera obscura" that can project a real-world scene onto a wall in a darkened room; a wooden pinball game he designed himself. (You can view an archive of Eli Whitney Museum projects here.)"

"Mobile devices like iPads and Androids have transformed the way we experience boredom. No longer is a wayward commuter forced to play Snake or Tetris, occupying themselves in a hardly satisfying, and utterly pixelated virtual reality. The tablet or smart phone-wielding travelers can now immerse themselves in an entire library of art and culture-related distractions, finding solace in everything from a Vincent van Gogh game to a digital version of the Louvre. Just this week, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a 140-year-old cultural stalwart of New York City, went the way of the future and introduced an iPhone app. Described as "exceedingly simple and modest" by Forbes, the move to make art more accessible is something we can't help but love. So, in the spirit of the Met's 21st century attitude, we've put together a list of mobile museums and art-honoring programs that will spark creativity in your everyday life. Behold, 18 apps every creative and artist type should download now:"

"The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is an all-digital library that aggregates metadata - or information describing an item - and thumbnails for more than 7 million photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more from libraries, archives, and museums around the ​united ​states.The Digital Public Library of America brings together the riches of America's libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world."

"Google Cultural Institute is a great resource with huge educational potential. We have already reviewed it when it was first launched a couple of years ago and since then new features and materials have been added to the platform. Google Cultural Institute puts 'the world's cultural treasures at your fingerprints' allowing you to explore the historical museums and monuments right from the comfort of your own place."

"A few weeks ago I presented at a teachmeet at the the Sydney Powerhouse Museum, AKA the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences. The topic was STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) + X (STEM+X). The idea was to share some of the things you have done and/or are doing in your classroom or workplace around integrating STEM with other KLAs, for example, a STEM and PE project would be STEM + PE. When I was asked to present, I thought it would be a great opportunity to share how I've been using Minecraft in my classroom over the last few years and how it really can be used across all subject areas. Just like the 'play' within the game itself, what you do with it in the classroom is only limited by your own creativity and that of your students. Below I will share some of the cool things that my students and i have done and how they link to KLAs across the curriculum."