In the article ICT and Cultural Heritage Education: Which Added Value?, researchers argue that “a huge and fast increasing number of cultural heritage artefacts have become digital: this has a significant effect on cultural heritage education, both because the number of objects available is incredibly enlarged and because each single artefact can be regarded and studied from many different perspectives” (Ott & Pozzi, 2008). However, it can also be argued that ICT is still overwhelmingly used for maintaining cultural heritage artefacts rather than learning about them.

For these reasons, cultural heritage coupled with ICT is increasingly seen by teachers and educators as an essential tool in their daily classes that can be better exploited. We asked European teachers what they think about cultural heritage in the European context.

You can easily search Europeana via key words or by colour, people, time period, and topics, or explore curated resources, ranging from virtual exhibitions and galleries to thematic collections on World War I, Art, Music, Fashion, Photography or Migration, with two new collections coming in 2018, Newspaper and Manuscripts.

The mission of Europeana is to transform the world with culture, unlock cultural heritage treasures and make them available online for everybody to enjoy, work or educate with.

Cultural heritage has a crucial role to play in education. Although educational curricula and national priorities differ, at the core of our educational systems we all want to make the most interesting and inspiring content available for students and lifelong learners. Europeana’s digitised collection of cultural heritage can provide multiple perspectives on historical, political, economic, cultural and human developments across Europe and beyond.

Europeana Education supports teaching and learning with innovative tools and resources like virtual learning environments (Historiana), eBooks (World War I: A battle of perspectives) or apps and games (Art Stories FACES). Some of the best examples for tools also include a Guide to using Europeana, which gives search tips and information on copyright and crediting, and Transcribathon, an online collaborative tool that allows students to transcribe World War I original documents such as diaries or letters and engage more fully with their past.

Europeana Collections provides access to over 50 million digitised with sophisticated search and filter tools to help you find what you are looking for. The resources that can be found in Europeana include:

The Collections include topics such as:

• 1914-1918 | • Music
• Arts | • Natural history
• Fashion | • Photography
• Maps and Geography | • Sport
• Migration

 

The Europeana Collections are created in collaboration with cultural heritage institutions around the world and include a refined filter tools option to provide better and more user-friendly search. Before you start browsing, it is useful to remember four questions that will make it easier to find what you are looking for:

Teachers and educators usually face several difficulties when planning their lessons. On the one hand, they have to find a way to “liven up” their classes with new and exciting resources. On the other hand, it is vital to make sure the content that they use in the classroom can be legally used. The Europeana Collections is the best solution to all the aforementioned obstacles. This platform is a digital cultural open library which allows you to access resources of museums all around Europe. This platform not only provides a safe environment for finding resources, but it gives you the opportunity to find items that can be reused straight away in your lessons, and that have been previously curated by professional experts to assure the quality and the authenticity of the resource.

In the following video you can see an example of how Brandão Maria Antónia, one of the 18 teachers in the Developer Group, used the Europeana 1914-1918 thematic collection and the Fashion from WW1 gallery in her learning scenario, War and peace...the changing role of Women 

Some examples of exhibitions that can be found in Europeana platform are the following:

Here you can see an example of how Miia Käär, one of the 18 Developer Group Teachers, used the An Ecstasy of Beauty exhibition in her learning scenario, Work by Finnish Artists on World Map, which aims at raising awareness of Finnish art and sites/places/countries that the artists show in their work.

The first resource we would like to mention is Transcribathon for education. This is an online collaborative tool designed with the partner Facts & Files, which allows students to transcribe and annotate documents related to the First World War, like diaries, letters, etc.

The possibilities offered by this tool are numerous, as you can choose from a large variety of handwritten texts and primary sources and use these documents in the context of any subject of your choice. This could be, for example, in History (related to WW1 and national/regional history), specific language classes, or in Civic, Social and Political Education programmes.

Transcribathon can be used in a wide variety of educational settings (from secondary to university level) and it allows students to work either in groups or individually. Besides, the tool is available in various languages, which helps students to engage even more fully with their heritage or to use it for language learning.

This is a very fun and powerful tool that can bring history to life, and that will help you engage students with history they don’t find in the textbooks.
If you want to give it a try, you can use this tool directly in your classroom or even set up a Transcribathon in your class or school ‘in competition’ with other schools. If you are interested in organising such an event with Europeana or with your Ministry of Education, you can get in touch here. Besides, you can also have a look at this video for more information. Have an in-depth look at the website to explore the numerous possibilities of using Transcribathon in education.

Some other tools worth mentioning are the following:

Here you can find three main elements which are very relevant for teachers: Apps, Publications and Curated datasets. These three spaces are hosted on Europeana Professional, a platform featuring Europeana resources and services for various professional communities, from educators and researchers to creative industries and cultural heritage experts.

According to the Europeana Impact Insights (2017) publication: “the problem for humanities researchers, teachers and creatives is that they do not always have easy access to trustworthy pan-European cultural heritage content, mainly because of a lack of digitization and copyright issues.” Therefore, the aim of Europana Professional is to create an open, creative and knowledgeable community in which stakeholders can share, improve and disseminate the benefits of cultural heritage. Now let’s explore what this means for education!
Europeana gives you access to a wide variety of applications, developed by third parties, that you can utilise in your class within many fields, such as Science, Cultural Heritage or Art.

You will find a selection of applications here. Some apps that are worth mentioning are: Sourcera, a free tool that allows you to search the largest archives in the world, Art Up Your Tabor Sound Connections. Please do consider that some of these applications have been created without direct supervision from Europeana and therefore proper functioning cannot be guaranteed. Try also the Vangoyourself tool.

Make sure you explore the platform thoroughly to find out how to enrich your educational resources and inspire learners with Europe's digital cultural heritage!

If you want to get some inspiration for activities that can be easily carried out outdoors, you can check out the following learning scenarios, made by three of the Developer Group teachers, which focus on the learning space and the learner’s role.

In a second phase of the project, a User Group of teachers (60 teachers from across Europe) have been testing the learning scenarios in order to provide feedback. More information about the Europeana DSI-3 project can be found here.

If you are interested in seeing all the learning scenarios the Developer Group has created, you can access them here by typing the key word Europeana.

In the following sections, we will explore some of these learning scenarios more thoroughly, and you will have the chance to discover how to integrate Europeana content into different subjects and using different methodologies.

Teachers using both PBL and AR claim that their use in the classroom is beneficial, as augmented reality changes the way that students interact with their world and the way they learn their subject matter. Besides, if you work with printed AR-enabled worksheets, you allow students to keep working with AR from home, which will keep their interest and engagement alive outside school. This aspect is very important, as it enables students to foster a positive relationship with education and technology, and they can advance at their own pace.

The scenario that Gilles has created allows students to link the past with today’s political problems, by combining project-based learning and augmented reality. In order to carry out this project, students have to find various resources (maps, photos, videos) about their region, Alsace, or any other region facing political tension. Once they have conducted the research, they construct an augmented reality product, also discussing how peaceful citizens can contribute to solving the initial political tension. This way, students have not only gained history knowledgeand technical skills by working for a period of time to investigate Alsace and its origins, but they have also become more motivated and engaged thanks to augmented reality. The combination of these two approaches makes teaching and learning more rewarding, as they help to connect students and schools with communities and the real world, which boosts students' engagement and motivation to work.

If you are interested in using PBL in your school, take a look at this page, where you will find the information you need to create a successful project that will maximise student learning and engagement.

If you want to know more about Augmented Reality, the International Society for Technological Education has a great number of resources on producing printable AR worksheets that can be adjusted to fit any age group and subject matter. Moreover, you can investigate the topic of AR further by reading A Scannable Solution for Your Classroom by Monica Burns, which provides educators with examples of how to use AR with QR Codes efficiently.

Inquiry-based learning (IBL) is an educational strategy through which students follow methods and practices similar to those of professional scientists in order to construct knowledge (Keselman, 2003). One of the benefits of using IBL is that the students are an active part of their own learning process: they must suggest an experimental activity to peers and design it. IBL is organised into different steps, in which teachers guide the students to think about an experimental idea, design the experiment and present the results to their peers.

Nowadays, inquiry is easier to implement in classrooms thanks to digital resources, and this is exactly what Europeana provides. Thanks to the use of digital material in the classroom, students engage effortlessly with activities, precisely because the scenario includes stimulating images and sounds. Europeana provides material that can be used to implement different kinds of IBSE activities in your classroom, and digital material that can be used to help carry out the experiment or present the results of an activity based on an IBSE methodology.

Students have to analyse the pitch and frequency of the audio data. In addition, students have to develop field work to collect real-life data from nature (using their mobile phones) and combine it with their classroom study. While developing the work, problems shall arise, which will be solved by students along the learning process, using the methodology of PBL.

The final product that students will create in this scenario is a poster or infographic. In order to create the infographic, students will have to familiarise themselves with open software tools such as Audacity and Sonic Visualizer. This final product will also enable students to reflect on what they have learnt during the project. Additionally, at the end of the project, results will be freely available for the educational community to work with.

This scenario follows a collaborative learning methodology, as students are asked to work in groups, which helps to improve their creativity.

If you would like access to the material that Rafael used to create this scenario, just follow this link.

The Napoleon as seen by the opponents learning scenario was designed in order to help students to think about satirical cartoons as historical documents and learn how to study a document in a specific context and how to present the results of this activity to peers.

Students are given satirical cartoons selected by the teacher from the Europeana repository to analyse. After a group discussion, students decide what kind of additional information they need to develop the learning outcome. Searching on Europeana, students will find more resources to complete their team work.

In this scenario produced by Jean-Christophe, students are work together to complete a task, which in this case is a final presentation about the topic. In order to do so, students are required to read the images and explain their idea about the historical context in which they were created - usually by opponents of Napoleon.

According to research by Laal and Ghodsi (2012), the benefits of collaborative learning are many: it allows the learner to realise her own interdependence with others, and encourages positive interaction and recognition of responsibility. What is more, collaborative learning (CL) in the classroom promotes critical thinking skills, increases results in the classroom and creates learning communities.

So, why not try to find a resource in Europeana that you can use for collaborative learning?

Within this learning scenario, children search for pictures about children from different decades and replicate the games played in the past. On the exhibition day, the students introduce their photos (originals retrieved through Europeana) and replicas/modern versions at their own location (a table in the corridor). If students have time, they complete extra tasks, such as recording interviews with their friends and family members, and search for additional information, such as toys or games used by them.

The project combines the subjects of (local) history, arts, and the Finnish and English languages, and covers skills such as critical information retrieval, media literacy and media usage (Photoshop and GIF). It also develops transversal competences such as linguistic and cultural skills and creative problem-solving, and it promotes digital learning, joy of learning, a collaborative atmosphere and student autonomy, as the students themselves are the drivers of their own learning process. The discussion to select the right picture and the creation of a modern version of the photo allows for collaborative work among the students, which is also very motivating and engaging for them.

The Learning Designer is produced independently by the London Knowledge Lab. It is a Web-based toolthat facilitates the creation and sharing of learning designs and supports the integration of learning technology.

The learning design is displayed as a sequence of activities you have created, similar to a lesson plan, and shows all the main properties you have included, such as topic, number of students, aims, outcomes, and duration of the learning time.
The first thing you need to do in order to become familiar with the Learning Designer, is to create an account, if you don't have one yet. You can create a new account here.

After logging in to the Learning Designer, at the top you will see a tool bar with two buttons, "Designer" and "Browser".

 

Within this section, you can design your lesson. Start with specifying the title and topic of the session, the number of students and the duration. Additionally, you can determine the aimsand outcomes of the lesson and give a short description.

Once you have given the necessary information, you can click on "Add TLA", with which you can start adding a set of Teaching and Learning Activities (TLA). You can add a name and choose from 6 learning types: Read/Watch/Listen, Collaborate, Discuss, Investigate, Practice or Produce. For every section, you can specify how long it might take (time), how many students are involved (individual work = 1), whether or not the teacher needs to be present and you can give a description of what the students are going to be doing exactly. You can continue adding TLAs as long as you wish.

Once you have finished the design, you will see a pie chart in the top right corner of the page. This tells you exactly what percentage of the lesson your students will be spending experiencing the different learning types. You can also adjust the total learning time, if necessary.

The Learning Designer also enables the teacher to attach links to Open Educational Resources (OERs) anywhere on the web. For example, a presentation on SlideShare could be attached to a Read/Watch/Listen activity; a curation tool could be attached to an Investigation activity; and a worksheet on a shared drive could be attached to a Production activity.

When you finish creating your lesson plan, make sure you click the "Save" button and add your design to the learning design library. You can also convert the design into a Word document and download it.

 

This section is there to help you browse other, completed learning designs. It is also possible to adapt one for your classroom, by clicking on "Turn editing on". This creates a copy of the original learning design that you can freely edit.

Now that you know how the Learning Designer works, give it a try and plan a lesson according to the learning scenario you have been creating in the previous modules.

You can also view this example of a lesson plan created in the Learning Designer: An hour of code. Make sure to scroll around the lesson plan, because not all elements will be displayed inside the window.

Once you have created your lesson plan with the Learning Designer, please add the link to the learning scenario in the learning activities section. Make sure you add as much detail to your lesson plan as possible, specifying the timing for each activity, as well as the tasks that the students will have to carry out.

We are sure you will enjoy the Learning Designer; it is a very useful tool you can keep using to plan your own lessons!

Summative assessment can take place during the implementation of the educational project, but is most often undertaken at the end of a project. It is outcome-focused, rather than process-focused. This type of assessment provides the means for finding out whether your project has reached its goals/objectives/outcomes.

On the other hand, formative assessment is a technique that allows the evaluation of student learning during an instructional unit by comparing it against some standard or benchmark. However, information from summative assessments can also be used formatively, when students or teachers use it to guide their efforts and activities in subsequent courses. According to the Carnegie Mellon University’s definition, the goal of formative assessment is to monitor student learning and to provide ongoing feedback that can be used by teachers to improve their teaching and by students to improve their learning.

Assessment can be carried out with different tools, including digital ones, such as Kahoot, Socrative, Plickers or Quizziz, all of which offer a platform to give participants valuable feedback.

Another innovative way of assessing students is peer assessment. Peer assessment is a collaborative learning technique, in which students assess their peers' work and have their work assessed by peers. It gives students feedback on the quality of their work, often with ideas and strategies for improvement.

Digital tools can help change assessment from something teachers do to students into something teachers and students collaboratively construct. Here are some examples of free tools teachers can use in their classrooms to create digital learning portfolios with their students: Padlet, Evernote, Kidblog. But it could be anything that has a shared platform, therefore making it accessible for everyone to contribute.

Rubrics are an attempt to delineate consistent evaluation criteria. They allow teachers and students to evaluate based on complex and objective criteria, and provide a framework for self-evaluation, reflection and peer review. With rubrics, it is possible to get a fair and accurate assessment, foster understanding of the topic at hand, and indicate a way to proceed with the learning/teaching, without actually having to "grade" students.

The European Digital Competence Framework for Citizens (DigComp) is a document that collects several guidelines and offers a tool to improve citizens’ digital skills.

As the World Economic Forum reports, the skills that people have are lagging behind the skills that people (or employers) actually need, and the gap is growing wider. The skills that are needed the most are collaboration, communication and problem-solving. These are primarily acquired through social and emotional learning (SEL). Eventually SEL leads to higher employability and educational fulfillment. If you would like to find out more regarding the World Economic Forum’s position on the issue, please consult this article.

It is interesting to compare this position with the framework of the National Council on Measurement in Education:

If you want to give it a try and use a rubric in your classroom, you can have a look at this rubric, prepared by teachers for teachers to assess their own lessons.

If you would like to follow the whole process of creating a learning scenario and then evaluating one’s own classroom implementation, you can have a look at the scenario prepared by Katarzyna Kwiatek-Grabarska: European Wonders of Nature with Europeana Collections.

In this scenario, Katarzyna uses Europeana collections to show the beauty of Europe by exploring scientific and cultural resources within Europeana, which enable students not only to acquire geographic and linguistic knowledge but also to interact with arts in a more innovative and engaging way. Moreover, students also had the opportunity to carry out a self-assessment with the online tool, Kahoot, which created a lot of interest and motivation among them.

If you want to know more about the scenario Katarzyna Kwiatek-Grabarska has prepared, you can access her scenario and all the resources she used to create it here.

Some criteria for using a rubric to assess a student's skill in relation to a cultural heritagelesson can be, for instance:

While using a rubric with your students, keep in mind that the primary aim of the rubric is not to grade or induce competition: rubrics help to assess, communicate and develop.

Have a look at this rubric that your students can use to do a self-evaluation of the work they have done in a task, a project, etc. As you can see, there are different categories that evaluate the students’ work, such as the quality of work, time management, problem-solving, attitude, etc. Please note this is only an example of a rubric you can use in your class, and therefore all these categories can be changed and adapted according to the skills and competences you would like to assess.

Christianity in the Middle Ages, a learning scenario created by Gwendoline Juilleron, is a good example of a History lesson that teaches collaboration to students. This scenario deals with how Christianity spread in the Middle Ages and how it became institutionalised, influencing politics, socio-economic values and the daily lives of people.