Europeana in Education: Re-use our Digital Cultural Heritage for the eLearning Awards

BRUSSELS, August 16, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- Europeana and European Schoolnet are pleased to invite teachers to build learning resources based on Europe's digital heritage, as part of this year's eLearning Awards (http://elearningawards.eun.org).

Europeana.eu is Europe's online museum, library and archive. It brings together digitised content from Europe's cultural and scientific heritage organisations, and makes that content accessible to Europe's citizens and to the wider world. All the countries of the European Union are submitting digital material from museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections, most of which is available for free.

The subject range is vast, and includes art and photography, music and composers, medieval and Renaissance Europe, biodiversity, maps, politics, football, war and peace. A search on Mozart, for instance, reveals pictures of him and his family members, letters to his wife and parents, the birth and death certificates of his children, together with his music scores, videos and recordings of famous musicians playing his music, including Daniel Barenboim giving an impromptu concert at the fall of the Berlin Wall.

We invite teachers to make creative use of the content accessible via http://www.Europeana.eu as a teaching resource. This could include the use of the material in a lesson plan, the development of a virtual exhibition on a curriculum topic or its use in teaching technology such as the development of a blog, digital lesson plan, Facebook site or even a mobile application.

The site allows multilingual access, so you can work in your own language, but sources are in their native languages. You can register and save your searches or copy and paste them into your creation. We can provide HTML for embedding items in a blog or Facebook. What you submit is entirely up to you. Entries will be judged on the basis of innovation, potential for use in collaborative work and didactic quality, among other criteria (full list available at: http://elearningawards.eun.org/ww/en/pub/elearningawards/rules.htm)

Winning entries will be included in the ThoughtLab ( http://www.europeana.eu/portal/thought-lab.html) of Europeana and maybe developed in a future release or in partnership with European Schoolnet, and also made available for the whole of Europe via the Learning Resource Exchange.

    To register for the eLearning Awards, and submit your entry, visit:
    http://elearningawards.eun.org.
    The deadline is 28 September 2010.
    About Europeana

Europeana (http://www.europeana.eu) is run by the European associations representing cultural heritage organisations and is a legal Foundation set up in 2007. The website is the flagship of the European Union's Digital Libraries Initiative and gives access to over 10 million digitised books, paintings, films and sounds. It offers a trusted, authoritative portal for cultural and scientific heritage provided by organisations throughout Europe.

About the eLearning awards

Since 2001, the eLearning Awards competition has been run by European Schoolnet and supported by key industry partners. Ten years after its launch, the eLearning Awards remain Europe's leading competition to reward excellence for the best use of technology in education. See http://elearningawards.eun.org

About European Schoolnet

European Schoolnet (http://www.europeanschoolnet.org) is a network of 31 Ministries of Education in Europe and beyond. EUN was created more than 10 years ago with the aim to bring about innovation in teaching and learning through the use of ICT for its key stakeholders: Ministries of Education, schools, teachers and researchers.

SOURCE European Schoolnet