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Innovating History Education for All
Start date: Sep 1, 2014, End date: Aug 31, 2017 PROJECT  FINISHED 

“Innovating History Education for All” aims to promote high-quality history, heritage, and citizenship education in Europe by enabling educators to create their own online learning activities and tools specifically designed to promote historical thinking and transversal competences. Web developers and history educators will form a partnership to design e-learning tools and co-create exemplar online learning activities that make effective use of these tools. These resources will be piloted, peer-reviewed, and disseminated via the existing and continuously expanding online education collaborative platform on European history and heritage “Historiana” (www.historiana.eu) and at numerous face-to-face training activities. This project addresses a key area of necessary innovation within history education: the vast potential for Open Educational Resources and Digital Learning. While ‘traditional’ history education in many countries continues to rely on the teacher and the textbook as the two focal points of every lesson, digital learning can put the student in an active role. It enables them to not only use but interact with all digitalized original sources (such as documentaries, music, interviews, paintings, political cartoons) or tailor-made learning activities prepared by the teacher with the specific curricula and desired learning outcomes in mind. Using ICT in the classroom makes it possible to strengthen collaborative learning, virtual inter-regional and cross-border exchange, and many other learner-centered and competence-based activities. It can make a most relevant and innovative contribution to school education and at the same time immerse students in a digital learning environment, vastly increasing their related key competences and skills with positive implications for their further educational careers, employability, and role as active citizens in an increasingly interconnected digital world. The project targets several hundred history, heritage, and citizenship educators who want to use innovative approaches in their daily work, particularly through the utilization of ICT and OER. Educators in this sense can be curriculum developers, textbook authors and developers of other teaching materials and tools, teacher pre-service and in-service trainers, teachers in primary and secondary schools and in higher education, trainee teachers, and also assessment experts, educational advisors and inspectors, educational staff in museums and institutes, and board members of professional associations. The Consortium also invites academics, representatives of educational authorities, school and university students, parents, and the wider public interested in history to join its activities. The activities will give these educators access to a wide selection of high-quality materials and will support them to share teaching ideas and co-create content with their peers from around Europe. The exemplar learning activities envisaged will foster competence-based approaches to the subject based on critical thinking and the ability to analyse content in a balanced way, question and compare interpretations, assess evidence and make independent judgments. By providing easy-to-use services and hands-on training the project will support a large group of educators to become more digitally confident, to act as multipliers with their colleagues, and to transmit their skills to their students. The Project Consortium will be composed of an international NGO, a web design company, a school, and two research institutes. Its areas of cooperation will include content sourcing, developing tools and applications, testing and piloting, peer- and expert-reviewing, and dissemination including training and awareness-raising of educators specifically in the field of digital learning and how to integrate ICT and OER in the daily work with their students. By way of bringing together practitioners and experts from a variety of backgrounds and countries, the project will further develop and improve the online educational platform Historiana by further enriching the content, strengthening the users’ community, and stimulating the usage of the website. The project will further support the establishment of a pan-European community of education practitioners and experts who promote the use of ICT and OER and the role of digital competences in history, heritage, and citizenship education. To ensure the project’s lasting impact, it includes a strong focus on professionalization and capacity building of history, heritage, and citizenship educators in different countries and geographic settings. The materials, tools and activities developed will provide the community of practitioners involved in the project with practical tools which will continue to develop over time.
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