About CrowdSchool
THE PROJECT'S OBJECTIVES
Crowdschool builds on diverse digital repositories such as Europeana. The project aims at enhancing the learning experience of students using the repositories of digital cultural heritage. CrowdSchool works with partner schools from the basis of the project, to guarantee the success of the educational objectives.
CrowdSchool provides educational partners with a unique opportunity to experiment, prototype, and share the results of new ideas based on creative collaborations with local and international cultural professionals. And most importantly, they are led to rediscover the creative, interactive, and fun aspects of the learning process. In this way, the project is expected to demonstrate how the cultural sector is a dynamic space for learning and exchanging knowledge.
HOW?
The training model proposed by the CrowdSchool project consists of different steps:
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Teachers select some themes of their interest, according to the mission of their school;
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Cultural professionals identify digital collections interesting for preparing lessons, researches, workshops focusing on those themes;
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Jointly the teams work together for defining the terminology to be used for describing the collections for that specific theme. The terminology is translated;
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The students start the annotation campaign, enriching in a creative way the educational content of the collections, and making them available also to all the students who in future will perform a similar query;
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Annotations done by the students of each school will be also revised by another class of a different country, encouraging in this way the development of critical thinking capacity in the revisers’ group. All the process will be organised according to a gamification scheme;
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Finally, in order to guarantee the sustainability of the system and pave the way to further annotation campaigns, the students will become the mentors of their younger colleagues of the following school year, supporting them in the annotation and validation process on a different educational theme.
RESULTS
The key outcomes achieved the CrowdSchool project are:
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Training teachers to use the CrowdSchool tools;
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Customizing training materials to the purposes of targeted educational communities, using digital culture heritage to respond to their specific training objective;
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Acquiring Key Competences, through a creative and critical thinking approach;
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Promoting co-creation and collaboration of teachers/children with cultural heritage organisations;
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Increasing awareness of the European teachers' community on the relevance of creative and critical thinking capacity, using an interdisciplinary approach combining science and humanities.