WHITE SALMON, Washington—Imagine opening a dog-eared textbook on ancient history or classical literature. Now imagine that instead of holding only silent words and static pictures, the book is alive with voices, music, and moving images: A three-dimensional Attic amphora rotating on a marble pedestal. The prologue to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales narrated aloud in Middle English. A scene from King Lear captured on camera, with an excerpt from the movie soundtrack "Interview with the Vampire" playing in the background.

At Columbia High School, teacher Peter Knowles has found a way to give new life to old stories with sound, color, video, animation, and dimension. Instead of just spewing back information on exams or essays that wind up in the trash can, Knowles' sophomores display their learning in virtual (digital) museums created on the classroom's six Macintoshes (software: HyperStudio). Museum visitors can ride virtual elevators or click on icons to move through the six wings, each with its own student "curator" and theme:
Group Membership: Ancient Civilizations
Legacies: Classical World to Renaissance
Living with Change: Technology
Exploring Limits: Revolution and Exploration
Beyond Hate: Leadership and the Holocaust
Special Exhibits: Research, Writings, and Other Sustained Projects

Just before Christmas, the six-student teams spent a class period visiting and rating each other's museums for the first three units. As they explore from wing to wing, the visitors can see the blending and mingling of content from two "linked" classes: Knowles' world history class and Lois Yake's world literature class. On exhibit is everything from politics to poetry to pottery.

Catching the elevator to the Ancient Civilization wing, visitors to one team's museum find two overlapping circles representing the city-states of Sparta and Athens. Clicking on icons arrayed in the circles reveals comparative traits of the military, government, and other aspects of the ancient cultures. Another museum features a colorful map of the ancient world. Clicking on a civilization, such as Egypt or Sumer, visitors get a close-up map of that area. Another click brings up critical attributes-such as leadership, occupations, religion, and agriculture-of each society. Posted on another wall of the wing, an essay on literary genres explores the distinctions between the ancient storytelling traditions of legend, myth, fable, parable, folk tale, and epic.

"Wow, this is some amazing stuff! Awesome!" one student enthuses as he takes a ride on a virtual elevator to the next wing, the Classical World. There, visitors can hear a student recite the first 18 lines of Canterbury Tales while they scroll through the text, which appears onscreen as an illuminated manuscript. Further exploration takes visitors to a room displaying classical art-Michelangelo's David and Botticelli's Birth of Venus. When visitors click on the sculpture or the painting, up pops a descriptive paragraph on that masterpiece. The click of another icon brings up a reference list citing sources for the images, which were scanned from textbooks. Knowles stresses the importance of crediting authors, photographers, artists, and publishers whenever images or text are borrowed from books or Web sites-and getting permission to use others' images or excerpts for museums that go online.

In the third wing-still "under construction" for most teams-visitors see evidence of technology's role in cultural change. Displays include timelines of the Industrial Revolution; essays on Isaac Asimov's I, Robot (a collection of short stories that delves into the ethics and trade-offs of technological advances); and this original poem, "Ode to My Computer," by student Davy Stevenson:

The museums-which account for 25 percent of students' course grade for history-are not without wit and whimsy. Some wings, in fact, are mainly showcases for hopping frogs, hovering helicopters, flying beanies with twirling whirligigs, and clever sound effects like kerplunk! and boing-boing. Says Knowles, "HyperStudio has tons of little gizmos like that." His philosophy: "You've got to let kids get that out of their system."

Besides making history and literature more visual-and therefore more tangible-for students, the museum project gives kids extra incentives to aim for excellence, Knowles says. For one thing, students draw upon their work-reports, quizzes, exercises-throughout the school year as they develop their exhibits. No longer are assignments destined for the recycling bin. The museums, Knowles says, help cement students' learning as they return to it again and again.

"We're looking at the museum as a permanent repository of work that the students are creating," says Knowles. "They're starting to care a lot more about the quality of the work they produce."

Another incentive is the audience. The museums are public places. Students can wander in and view their classmates' creative and intellectual efforts. And, to expand the visitor base exponentially, the best museums will be posted on the Web, where browsers from around the world can make virtual visits. At year's end, Knowles plans to invite the community in for a "grand opening" of the virtual museums. Awards will be presented for the most outstanding exhibits. Notes Knowles, "When you increase the audience, you really do increase students' interest and effort."

In yet another community outreach, Knowles hopes to link the virtual museums to an actual museum, Maryhill Museum of Art, which graces a windswept bluff near the school in the Columbia Gorge. With Maryhill's eclectic collections that include "an incredible American Indian basketry and pottery exhibit," the museum is a rich historical and cultural resource practically on the school's doorstep.

The museum project, Knowles says, helps prepare students for 21st-century styles of information acquisition and manipulation. "If they acquire this information on Sparta and Athens, and they've manipulated it into an essay, can they also manipulate it into a visual display or into a sound bite?"

Editor's Note: Peter Knowles is a participant in the TELDEC teacher training project co-sponsored by the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory's Technology Program and Washington's ESD 112 Educational Technology Support Center. See Page 7 for more information.

TEACHER'S FOOTNOTES

On the software:
"With HyperStudio, there's a real easy way to create 3-D animation by putting any object-say an Indian basket-on a lazy Susan and then, using a digital camera on a tripod, taking 32 pictures of the object as you turn it around. Then you animate it, and it becomes an exhibit that shows up as a graphic on the screen. When you move the cursor over the object, the cursor becomes a little hand, which the viewer can use to turn the object around onscreen. And it doesn't take that much memory."

On visual elements:
"For the comparison of Sparta and Athens required for the Ancient Civilization wing, a lot of students just took their essays (an earlier class assignment) and threw them up on the wall of the museum. That's why I require visual elements for every wing, so students don't just have four walls of writing. That becomes kind of tedious. Scrolling through text is not the best way to present or acquire that information."

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