Search and use Europeana Collections to teach your subject

7th May 2018

The focus of this module is on the Europeana Collections, the huge variety of Europeana’s content, themes, media formats and languages and show how these rich and unique resources can support teachers regardless of the subject they teach.

They have highligted Europeana’s curated resources, such as thematic collections, online exhibitions and galleries that can give inspiration to teachers in their daily practices.

Main aims of the Module:

• Understand what the Europeana Collections are and the benefits of using them in your lessons;
• Learn how to search the Europeana Collections for relevant content, navigate copyright information and correctly attribute cultural records;
• Explore Europeana’s curated resources (thematic collections, online exhibitions and galleries) and the possibilities for using them in teaching;
• Continue to explore the learning scenario.

2.1 Europeana Collections

Europeana Collections is Europe’s digital library, museum, gallery and archive that provides online access to a vast store of cultural heritage material from across Europe. Through this multilingual platform, individuals and professionals can discover, research, share and enjoy Europe’s wealth of digital cultural resources such as books, photos, paintings, television broadcasts and 3D objects.

Europeana Collections provides access to over 50 million digitised with sophisticated search and filter tools to help you find what you are looking for. The resources that can be found in Europeana include:

• Texts: books, letters, archival papers, dissertations, poems, newspaper articles, facsimiles, manuscripts and music scores
• Images: paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, pictures of museum objects, maps, graphic designs, plans and musical notation
• Video: films, news broadcasts and television programmes
• Sound: music and spoken word from cylinders, tapes, discs and radio broadcasts
• 3D: virtual 3D representations of objects, architecture or places

The Collections include topics such as:

• 1914-1918

• Music

• Arts

• Natural history

• Fashion

• Photography

• Maps and Geography

• Sport

• Migration

The Europeana Collections are created in collaboration with cultural heritage institutions around the world and include a refined filter tools option to provide better and more user-friendly search. Before you start browsing, it is useful to remember four questions that will make it easier to find what you are looking for:

Who? When? What? Where?

Why are these collections so useful for us?

"This platform is a digital cultural open library which allows you to access resources of museums all around Europe. This platform not only provides a safe environment for finding resources, but it gives you the opportunity to find items that can be reused straight away in your lessons, and that have been previously curated by professional experts to assure the quality and the authenticity of the resource. "

We have shared our ideas online and I must say that the platform is a good tool for online research: here is the link to what some educators have shared with us

https://padlet.com/eunacademy/yiqn4hpm9yo4

2.2. How to search the Europeana Collections

A guide is available online: it can be downloaded in different languages

https://pro.europeana.eu/post/guide-to-using-europeana-in-education

I have dowloaded the English guide and it seems to be useful and with lots of information. Here is the video created by one of the moderators:

Search Tips

• When looking for information to implement in your lesson, search the thematic collections, as they are already curated, which will save you a lot of time.
• When searching for material, you might find material for limited use; check the original source and its copyrights, as they might differ from the Europeana copyrights, for example.
• When one first searches a thematic collection, it is easier to narrow down the search, especially for younger students. For example, landscape paintings are better found in the thematic collection and are ready for use. You save time, and it is difficult for younger students to search without a certain theme.
• To search through the portal, you can use filters, but you should write the keyword properly, because if it is not spelled correctly, it will not work. It might be useful to use the search tips in the Guide to use in Education to help you with the search.
• When searching for items in Europeana, you will see their copyright information. If the material you want to use has restrictions, do not give up, search through the restrictions! You might be able to use it for educational purposes. For example, the pictures in this scenario are of limited use in Europeana, but when one checks the original source, they appear to be under the Finnish national copyright system and are free to use for educational purposes, if the original author is mentioned.

I really like the copyright information and I think that I will use some material for my lessons. In particular I would like to use some images related to WWI and some paintings for using the descriptive language in English.

https://www.europeana.eu/portal/en/exhibitions/visions-of-war/trench-life

Link online with our searches shared in the Padlet :

https://padlet.com/eunacademy/uusu6h50y6od

2.3 Thematic Collections, Galleries and Exhibitions

Thematic Collections

Thematic collections are a more detailed dive into the highlights of popular topics on the Europeana platform. :

here is a list of what you can see online

• Europeana Art – A thematic collection that gathers artworks, such as paintings, drawings and prints from European institutions.
• Europeana Fashion – Demonstrates hundreds of thousands of catwalk photographs, historical dresses and accessories. Specific fashion-related filters (such as designer, item type, technique) help you narrow your search to find specific content.
• Europeana Music – Includes more than 250.000 music recordings, pieces of sheet music and musical instruments. Under the banner of Europeana Sounds, the Europeana Radio project was developed to give people a way to discover and listen to the music from Europeana Music.
• Europeana Photography – This thematic collection includes more than 1 million photographs.
• Europeana 1914-1918 - Stories, films and historical material about the First World War. Since 2011, Europeana 1914-1918 has worked with partners in 22 countries to hold family history “roadshows” to which the public bring their documents and stories from the First World War to be scanned or photographed and added to the archive.
• Europeana Migration - Dedicated to the theme of migration to, from and within Europe. This collection is still growing in 2018.

Here is an example of the use of Europeana: teaching WWI

Exhitions

Exhibitions are vivid stories coming from the thematic collections that bring their highlights to life by adding interesting information and creating narratives that can be viewed in a new, visually appealing format. An exhibition has around 10-20 images, and additional videos or text explaining the context of the artworks.

Some examples of exhibitions that can be found in Europeana platform are the following:

• Art (e.g. Art Nouveau - Universal Style)
• Fashion (e.g. Past to Present - Fashion Reinterpretations)
• Music (e.g. Recording and Playing Machines)
• Photography (e.g. Industrial Photography in the Machine Age)
• World War I (e.g. Sausages and Cigars for Christmas)

Here you can see an example of how Miia Käär, one of the 18 Developer Group Teachers, used the An Ecstasy of Beauty exhibition in her learning scenario, Work by Finnish Artists on World Map, which aims at raising awareness of Finnish art and sites/places/countries that the artists show in their work.

Galleries

Galleries present a curated selection of images on a certain theme. Most of the galleries are related to the aforementioned thematic collections: Europeana Art, Europeana Music, Europeana Fashion and Europeana 1914-1918. You can access the galleries here. Licensing information is provided for all of the Galleries.

Some galleries that you can explore:

• Art by female artists
• Fashion illustrations
• Women in World War I
• Photographs of choirs from around Europe

In the following video you can see an example of how Brandão Maria Antónia, one of the 18 teachers in the Developer Group, used the Europeana 1914-1918 thematic collection and the Fashion from WW1 gallery in her learning scenario, War and peace...the changing role of Women In this video, Maria Antónia talks about how the implementation of the learning scenario went, lessons learned and advice for teachers considering using this same scenario in their class.

How can we use these documents and collections?

There are numerous possibilities to use the thematic collections, galleries and exhibitions. One example could be to use one thematic together with a gallery, as you can see in this learning scenario developed by Fulvia Piccolo, primary school teacher from Italy. With this scenario, Fulvia aimed to create an interactive e-book about landscapes, for which she used the European landscapes and landmarks gallery from the Europeana platform, which offers paintings of the landscapes and landmarks of Europe, showing the variety and beauty of this great continent. To develop her learning scenario, Fulvia also used the Europeana Maps and Geography thematic collection, which allows you to explore 468,404 maps, globes, charts and more from collections across Europe, as well as the Rivers and canals gallery.

2.4 The Learning Scenario, Step 2: Trends, learning objectives and skills

It’s time to think about the relevant trends your scenario will follow (this can be, for instance, Social Media Learning, Mobile Learning, Game-Based Learning, etc.), completing the set of tools you started to work on in the previous module (both online and offline) and think about the learning objectives, skills and competences that the learner will develop and demonstrate within the scenario (e.g. 21st-Century Skills, such as communicative skills, creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, etc.). When you mention the skills your students will develop, make sure you also mention how they will develop this specific competence; so, the concrete activity that will help them to develop those competences, you will mention in this section of the learning scenario.

A useful website we have been asked to check online :

http://www.p21.org/our-work/p21-framework

2.5 Webinar: Discover Europeana for STEAM Education

Link to the slides http://www.europeanschoolnetacademy.eu/documents/4625641/5040283/Europeana_DSI3_Webinar_Discovering+europeana+for+steam+education_Isabel+Crespo_Rafal+Montero_08052018.pdf/631c4b8d-8e8b-4282-94f6-a81fc527ddcb