I was struggling to find another tool that I thought I would really "use" in my classroom. I found the tool, Museum Box. The tool is free, and very adaptable for a variety of uses. If you think about museums, these trays are the drawers that might hold gems, fossils, or bones of prehistoric creatures. From the posted examples, it looks like a great tool to do a biography, but I intend to use it as an assessment tool for a Life Science Unit on plants.
In Museum Box, students create "cubes" of information by creating or finding information, affixing it to the sides of cubes, and then placing those cubes in a labeled tray. You can select the number of spaces in the tray, and hence, the number of cubes. You can add text, images, sounds, video, or music to your cube, making each cube a unique museum archive. Given a rubric, I can see this as a great visual, paperless assessment for what students have learned in a unit.
I created an example Museum Box, using images I found online. I made one cube for information on Bean Seeds. My students sprouted pinto beans and observed the seeds/plants for three weeks. They have detailed drawings to include. The second cube would be about plant structure and function, while the third cube gets into Angiosperms. Additional topics: Photosynthesis, Gymnosperms, Mosses, etc. You have to create an online account to save your project, but it doesn't ask for anything more than a login and password. You can sign up as a school, and it would be great if the teacher can then access all students' projects, but I need to do some further experimentation to see if that's the case.
The tool seems pretty easy to use, and I can see it being a great option for projects and/or alternative assessments.
Regards,
Paula
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