How can online tools promote historical thinking? A teacher training guide now available

The potential for the use of digital cultural heritage in education is widely acknowledged, but it doesn’t happen just by providing access to the material. Sources need to be selected, contextualised, and (crucially) become part of learning activities for students. Find out about how Europeana and the European Association of History Educators (EUROCLIO) worked together to inspire and support educators to create their own learning activities.

A practical tool for teacher trainers available now

The Teacher Training Guide How to use online tools to promote historical thinking? is designed for teacher trainers to challenge and support their trainees or colleagues to create, adapt and use eLearning activities that promote historical thinking using the Historiana eLearning Environment and European Source Collections.

This Teacher Training guide focuses on the needs of teacher trainers to make it easy for them to provide workshops that are motivating and meaningful for the trainee teachers that participate. The guide gives teacher trainers access to the ready-to-use peer-reviewed material. And it supports teacher trainers in encouraging trainees to create their own eLearning Activity based on a historical thinking challenge.

What’s in the guide?

The Guide opens with some background information on the developers, the Historiana eLearning Environment and why the guide was developed. It includes practical information on how to set up a workshop that teacher trainers can use as a guide to construct their own way to deliver the training.

One section, Setting a challenge for teachers, presents a set of six challenges to teachers to create an eLearning activity that helps students to think and work historically.

Source material

All the source collections, eLearning activities and other materials are open source and available on the Europeana Collections and Historiana websites. These sources include a wide range of collections from Different Views on Napoleon Bonaparte, Post War Europe, to Orientalist Art and Schisms within Christianity (see image below). Examples of eLearning Activities focus are Writing good historical narratives, How did a World War break out in 1914?, What can sources reveal about Europe 1945-47? and Why did so many Europeans migrate to the USA?.

The source collections are not only available but are curated, contextualised and licensed to be reused.

What’s next for Europeana and EUROCLIO?

At the end of the workshops, the trainee teachers are asked to give suggestions and imagine what should be improved, thereby ensuring that the Historiana web resource (from EUROCLIO) is further developed in a way that meets the needs of its audience.

In the upcoming months, the Teacher Training Guide will be used by trainers during professional development events with EUROCLIO members and Teacher Training Institutes. EUROCLIO and Europeana will also work together on workshops using the Europeana Collections content. In parallel, EUROCLIO and Europeana are working with professional historians and practising history educators to develop eLearning activities and Source Collections, so that trainers can select from a much broader range of themes and topics for their workshops.

For more information, help organising a teacher training event, please contact steven@euroclio.eu.