Are you interested in integrating digital cultural heritage into your English language classroom? Do you think that cultural heritage is an integral part of every classroom? If your answer is yes, then you should explore Europeana Collections and check out what they have in store for you.
Europeana Platform- Transforming The World With Culture
Europeana is a platform for digital cultural heritage, launched by the European Commission in 2008, with a mission to transform the world with culture. The platform provides access to more than 50 million digitised items which are aggregated and contributed to Europeana by thousands of libraries, museum, galleries, and archives. These digitised items are images, photos, paintings, sound recordings, texts, videos, and 3D objects. Over 20 million items are free to be reused in education, and namely openly licensed.
Europeana Collections
In order to make Europeana platform easy to use, lots of items are curated under different collections such as 1914-1918, Art, Archaeology, Fashion, Industrial Heritage, Manuscripts, Maps and Geography, Migration, Music, Natural History, Newspapers, Photography, and Sports. You can also browse the platform by colours, sources, topics, people, time periods, or galleries, and you can even use interesting exhibitions on different topics.
Europeana Teacher Community
Europeana wants to promote using digital cultural heritage in the classrooms by teachers of different subjects. Therefore, together with European Schoolnet (a network of European Ministries of Education), they have established a network of Europeana Teacher Ambassadors and their user group teachers. The network consists of 13 Europeana Ambassadors from Croatia, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Malta, Poland, POrtuf+gal, Romania, Spain, and Turkey, and one representing the European Schools. Each ambassador has ten user group teachers of different profiles, and they all work on creating learning scenarios using Europeana resources, implementing them in the classrooms across Europe, and giving feedback about the implemented scenarios. The learning scenarios and stories of implementation explore a wide range of topics; they are innovative and creative and are free to be reused by other teachers.
Teaching With Europeana Blog
In March 2019, Teaching with Europeana blog was launched, and it is moderated by 13 ambassadors. It contains more than 200 learning scenarios and stories of implementation created by teachers of different profiles. The blog is regularly updated with new scenarios, and you can freely use the materials, adapt them to your classroom, or find inspiration for your own learning scenarios. You can check out the blog on the following link: https://teachwitheuropeana.eun.org/
Europeana Massive Open Online Courses
European Schoolnet also organises Europeana MOOCs, which will be running for the third time in 2020. There are English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and French versions of the MOOC under the name ‘Europeana in your classroom: building 21st-century competences with digital cultural heritage’. The English version has five modules and teaches you how to search and use Europeana collections to teach your subject, introduces you to Europeana educational tools and resources, and gives teachers an opportunity to design a learning scenario using Europeana content and possibly get it published on the blog.
Europeana In Your English Classroom
In the blog, you can find a lot of learning scenarios for English classrooms that you can use, adapt, or get inspired by them. The learning scenarios that are to be presented are to be used with high school students(15-18, EFL) and explore different topics. Two of them are interdisciplinary, and different web tools are used to make learning more engaging and motivating for students.
Migration Socratic Seminar
Migration Socratic Seminar’ combines the Socratic Seminar method and Europeana Migration collection to teach students about different aspects of migration. Socratic Seminar is an excellent way to get your students talking, encourage student-led discussions, and student-centered learning. This learning scenario also uses flipped classrooms and tools, such as Talkwall and Wizer. Check the learning scenario on the following link: https://teachwitheuropeana.eun.org/learning-scenarios/migration-socratic-seminar-ls-hr-01/
Colorful Culture In The 1950s: Blue Skies, Red Panic
This learning scenario is an interdisciplinary scenario combining EFL and History. By working on six Genially digital stations, students learn about different aspects of one historical era, namely the 1950s. They explore texts from Europeana exhibition ‘Blue skies, red panic,’ discuss and think critically about this period of history. After this, they throw a 1950s thematic party- they wear 1950s clothes, play music from that era, and start conversations on different 1950s topics that they have been exploring. In the end, they write a newspaper article about this historical era using the newspaper clipping generator Fodey, and they carry out peer assessment. Check this learning scenario on the following link:
Europeana Living Museum
This interdisciplinary learning scenario combines EFL, Arts, IT, and Entrepreneurship. It is also a whole-school activity that requires collaboration between different classes. Each class does research on the topic of the human body in arts by studying the works of various artists, analyze their work, and recreate paintings/sculptures in the form of a living museum. Ultimately, they create digital brochures using Canva, in different languages(English, German), a museum webpage using Wix, and a museum shop. Each classroom is responsible for ‘building’ one ‘room’ of the museum. The best room is elected by a school jury. You can further explore this scenario on the link:
https://teachwitheuropeana.eun.org/learning-scenarios/europeana-living-museum-ls-hr-10/
If you are interested in integrating digital cultural heritage in your classroom, you should definitely visit the Europeana webpage https://www.europeana.eu/portal/en and the blog https://teachwitheuropeana.eun.org/ .
