Project Summary

Making Culture Alive - Digital Escape Room

Exchange of Good Practices

CONTEXT AND OBJECTIVES

In European schools, teaching of cultural heritage and traditions has typically been quite passive -visits to places having cultural importance (museums, monuments) or presentations (songs, plays, dances etc). In this project, we will organize creative activities in terms of digital education to adopt new teaching methods and to promote the teaching of European cultural heritage. We will focus on developing digital education in a way that students will be inspired to discover representations of cultural heritage and traditions. It is attempting to develop new innovative ways to make European cultures visible and to promote the sense of belonging to Europe. For teachers this is a project that helps to develop professional skills. For example, teachers will also evaluate their strengths, weaknesses and developmental needs for distance learning. This aim was raised mainly because of the current coronavirus situation - almost all schools are currently closed in Europe. Different countries have provided different approaches and solutions for distance education. Also, resources for distance education differ a lot among countries. Thus, we will gather all the experiences of distance learning under the state of this exceptional pandemic in European countries and we will share good practices and make suggestions to improve digital education and distance learning in European schools.

METHODS

The project will be based on a continuous way of working including totally six international workshops (each one will last for 5 days) to promote digital education and new teaching methods through cultural issues and traditions. Firstly, the teachers will work on gathering all the information on distance learning caused by the coronavirus pandemic. We will share experiences among the partners, and we will make suggestions to improve digital learning in educational institutions. Secondly, we will work on both cultural issues and digital education at the same time. In each international workshop, we will organize a "digital escape room". Students will solve problems and find clues to get out of the room. For solving the problems, they need to use ICT skills they have learned and adopted in the workshop or earlier in the project. Those digital escape rooms will have cultural themes representing local traditions and culture - the players have to find clues and solve problems rising up from the themes. Between the international workshops, students write and produce presentations about local cultural heritage and traditions by using various digital methods - they will make local stories alive by ICT methods learned and shared in the project. The teachers will develop professional ICT skills by sharing expertise within the partnership and by putting new methods into use in their schools.