Background
The Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery (RAMM) is
the regional museum covering Exeter and parts of Devon in the
south west of England , UK . Run by Exeter City Council, it welcomes
around 230,000 visitors a year including over 15,000 school children.
RAMM houses collections from prehistoric times to today and from
all around the world including natural history, local history,
fine and decorative arts and world cultures collections.
www.exeter.gov.uk/museums
RAMM currently receives significant Government funding through ‘Renaissance’,
the Museums Libraries and Archives Council’s ground-breaking
scheme to transform England ’s regional museums. This has
allowed them to employ staff and deploy budgets so they can experiment
with new approaches to museum learning, which include videoconferencing.
www.mla.org.uk
“We have also enjoyed the support of the Devon Curriculum
Services’ Digital Media Education Centre and the South
West Grid for Learning who have helped guide our videoconferencing
work. Local schools have been brilliant helping us pilot sessions
and we are also very grateful for specialists who input into
our sessions with their enormous depth and breadth of knowledge,” said
Access Officer Kate Osborne.
For a downloadable document with full details of how the Royal
Albert Memorial Museum developed videoconferencing with schools,
please click here [PDF doc]
Why videoconferencing?
Kate Osborne is the Access Officer for RAMM who heads up the
museums learning team of qualified teachers. Their job is to
make the collections at the museum as engaging and as much fun
as possible for as many school age children as they can manage.
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RAMM wanted to push the boundaries of how they could
make their museum collections more interactively accessible
to schools and, in this clip, Kate Osborne explains why
they decided to start using videoconferencing, and two
of her team look a the pros and cons.
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They chose the Romans as their key theme because they have
strong collections and knowledge in this area and have found
it’s always a winner with schools and children!
The outcomes the museum were looking to achieve are
linked to the Generic Learning Outcomes (GLO’s) from Inspiring
Learning for All, the framework for learning in museum, libraries
and archives.
See www.inspiringlearningforall.org for
more details. They were also guided by the National
Curriculum outcomes relating to Key Stage 2 Roman Life.
See www.dfes.gov.uk for
more details.
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In this clip Kate Osborne talks about the intended outcomes
and team members Tammy and Olly talk about the impact on
their own professional development outcomes relating to
the know how of videoconferencing.
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Plans for the future
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RAMM will be undergoing major redevelopment between
2007-2010 and will shift their operations base physically
out into the community for this time. Videoconferencing
will be one of the ways they will continue to deliver their
service during this period and, in 2010, they will launch
a programme of videoconferences from their refurbished
Exeter base which will be available to schools around the
country.
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Acknowledgements
None of this would have happened without the help of Tim Arnold
and Steve Cayley from Devon Curriculum Services and Ian White
from the South West Grid for Learning.
Nor would the lively sessions have been possible without the
unstinting good humour, enthusiasm and determination of our Museum
Learning Officer team Dave Saunders, Caroline Wightman, Hayley
Thorpe, Neal Heasman, Tammy Addie and Olly Martin our ever-energetic
Roman soldier. It is a real privilege to work with them all.
Finally our thanks to the staff and pupils of Exwick Middle,
Stoke Hill Middle, Newton and Broadhembury schools in Devon for
allow themselves to be experimented upon and for feeding back
so helpfully. Also to Plumpton Junior and St Mary’s Primary
Schools with whom we worked on this case study.
Kate Osborne, Access Officer, July 2006
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