This year, a series of initiatives and events will take place across Europe in order to enable people to become closer to – and more involved with – their cultural heritage. Throughout 2018, 7840 events will take place in a total of 28 countries, with 1,120,000 participants from all around Europe, celebrating the continent’s diverse cultural heritage which helps to shape our identities and everyday lives.

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:

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.

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.

Publications
The collection of Europeana publications is important, especially if one wishes to look behind the processes that drive Europeana and would like more information on the goals, business plansand research created by and about Europeana. One of the most relevant Europeana publications is the Guide to using Europeana in Education. This guide introduces the basic principles of searching for and using Europeana’s content in education, and it covers topics like copyright and licenses that allow educational reuse. The guide is available in English, French and Spanish, and it can be used by educators across all subjects, students and lifelong learners, developers of educational resources and educational publishers. Follow this link to explore the Guide to using Europeana in Education further.

Curated Datasets
Curated datasets are the best way to save time while browsing the Europeana database. Curated databases are carefully selected Europeana content records on a particular topic. Check out the datasets in case you have no time browsing more than 50 million items. Here are some examples:

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!

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.

By working collaboratively, students will select Europeana WWII resources, discuss ideas, and use ICT and augmented reality tools to produce a learning outcome, including video records, images and so on.

If you are wondering how Europeana can be used in a project-based learning (PBL) methodology to learn about augmented reality, keep reading!

According to the Buck Institute for Education, project-based learning is a teaching method in which students gain knowledge and skills by working for an extended period of time to investigate and respond to an authentic, engaging and complex question, problem, or challenge. Wikipediadefines augmented reality as a direct or indirect live view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are "augmented" by computer-generated perceptual information, thus altering one’s current perception of a real-world environment.

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.

There are many ways to combine project-based learning and augmented reality. Give it a try with your students!

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.

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.

Below you can watch an interview with the creator of this scenario, Kimmo Kortelainen, where he reflects on how the implementation of the learning scenario went and what could have been done differently. The interview also features some student testimonials! All the material used by Kimmo can be found here.

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.

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.

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.

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.