Pre/Post Visit Resources: HME Meeting Notes Monday September 15, 2014

We had a nice, large group who met to kick off the 2014-2015 year! We met at Bangkok Spoon, which had great food and a bustling atmosphere.

McMaster Museum of Art FAQ videos

Video 2
Video 3
Video 4

• We made them using software from Adobe Creative Suite: Photoshop, After Effects and Premiere Pro.
• Used animations and some video footage of museum staff, sound effects, voice; created entirely in-house with help of summer student and Communications Officer. These videos can be found on the museum’s blog as well as YouTube.
• Museum in England where school vids made video for rules (teacher is the actor who brome the rules). On our FB.
• Some online sites (historic house museum in new york city) had a contract where people had to sign.

Are there any resources you direct visitor to prior to visits?

• Environmental programs: ministry of natural resources. Look up species.
• Doubtful if teachers read or use any pre-visit materials. Have to question how much museum employee effort to put in to these materials if they are little used.
• Pre/post visit packages: Homer Watson developing this year.

Photography policy

• without express permission, get back of heads, just hands.
• Summer camps, direct to parents, a bit easier. But still don't put photos on Facebook.
• Idea: can use employees' kids.
• Photo sign offs for high school program. Some without just noted. Ended up getting many photos, and they can be used far into the future.

Water festival coming up in Haldimand.

Post visit

• survey. Not much response.
• Follow up email with hope you have a good time, thanks. Personal contact maybe more effective than survey.
• Can create a quiz for teachers to take home with them after program and use in classroom.
• Pre-visit orientation research shows learning outcomes better for groups who were told about schedule for the day first.
• Hypothesis is that kids were more relaxed because they knew what was happening.
• Kids take in more with activities to fill in along the way?
• Ask questions while waiting at end of day: what was your favourite thing today? Informal way of getting feedback and reinforcing positive learning from the trip.
• Schoolwork on field trip: should coordinate with teacher so kids take the work seriously.
• Try to keep it short: kids aren't going to write out paragraphs.
• Feedback: tried with a qr code, didn't help. Try with incentive of itunes card. See if that gets feedback.

Seniors: equally need to be informed of no touching rules.

Social Media

• Wifi in space: many people ask for it.
• Facebook's “out”. Twitter and Instagram are the more popular of social media sites. AskFM is popular, but very easily devolves into a bullying avenue.
• Twitter ideas:
• Taxidermy animals (a mascot for a museum) has it's own twitter feed.
• Natural History of Museum on uk had jar of mould with twitter feed.
• Top 5 reasons to follow museum mascots on social media
• Tweets from dead Prime Ministers.
• Tweets/retweets for prizes.
• Pinterest

Maybe do a meeting about emergency planning.
Paint club: everyone gets materials, painting is described, booze, get to go home with original artwork

Book Club: Linda Norris of Uncatalogued Museum