At the end of August, the second working meeting of the expert team for the project “Innovative History Education for All” was held in The Hague. This three-year project is part of the long-term development of the historiography portal Historiana. The project leader is EuroClio, the European association of history teachers. The project coordinators are Steven Stegers and Judith Geerling. Members of the expert team include Pascal Tak, Helen Snelson, Natia Pirtskhalava, Richard Kennett, Súsanna Margrét Gestsdóttir, and Miljenko Hajdarović.
The project comprises several phases of activities:
- Needs Assessment – evaluating how ICT can help history teachers perform their work more effectively.
- Cross-Border Source Collection – history teachers need various sources to create high-quality, multi-perspective lessons; these sources can be difficult to access and language often poses an additional challenge. A core component of the project is creating source collections, which don’t need to be extensive but should enable teachers to craft engaging lessons.
- Online Teaching Tools – the project aims to develop four entirely new online tools for teaching history. These tools are unique in that they are specifically designed to foster critical historical thinking and encourage the use of digitized historical sources.
- Examples of Online Activities
- Multilingual User Manual (in 28 languages)
- Educational Policy and Curriculum Report – The Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research will create a report on reshaping European history curricula from content-focused to student competency-oriented approaches.
In our work so far, we have examined how the history teaching process can be enhanced through the use of ICT. The goal is not merely to use technology because it is available or to simply replace one medium with another (like textbooks with projectors), but to create tools that engage teachers and students in creation and exploration. At the last meeting, we finalized which four tools we will move into production and test in the next phase of the project. Part of the process involved analyzing 45 existing tools recommended by students from Fontys Lerarenopleiding Tilburg.
The tools will enter public testing and piloting in the 2016/2017 school year.
