Goals

The overall aim of the project is to enable cultural institutions to design and produce educational resources aimed at children and pre-teens (aged 5–12) based on European digital cultural content, with particular attention to data quality, licences, the selection and contextualisation of sources, and the creation of educational experiences suitable for primary and lower secondary schools. With this in mind, the training is designed as a guided process aimed at raising awareness and developing specific skills: participants are supported in transforming digital objects and collections (images, metadata, narratives) into teaching materials, worksheets, micro-activities and workshop prototypes.

The immediate goals are:

• to inform and raise awareness amongst the educational departments of cultural institutions regarding the possibilities for adopting the ECCCH;
• to broaden the range of organisations capable of understanding the tools, standards and principles of interoperability;
• to provide practical support for skills development, whilst reducing barriers to data reuse.

The partner

In partnership with Explora, Rome’s Children’s Museum; HandsOn! International, the non-profit organisation dedicated to interactive museums and exhibitions for children around the world; and Alchimilla, the social cooperative that runs educational projects for children using art, theatre and new digital technologies.

Training activities

The training programme is divided into a series of activities:

• A practical guide to using the European Cultural Cloud and related ecosystems, with a user-centred approach tailored to museum education services and practitioners planning outreach activities.
• 10 video lessons designed for modular learning that can also be reused in self-study contexts, covering modules on finding and evaluating digital resources, organising a set of materials to create an educational programme, an in-depth look at storytelling and interdisciplinary links, and an introduction to the responsible use of AI in an educational setting.
• 1 hands-on toolkit comprising a set of 10 exercises and participatory activities, designed as workshops that can be replicated by institutions to guide the development of educational activities (worksheets, observation games, narrative pathways, thematic micro-collections, source comparison activities), right through to the creation of a final educational ‘product’ ready for trialling.
• 1 technical appendix containing reusable resources and scripts for querying and processing data and digital collections.

Echoes

ECHOES’ mission is to establish the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH), a shared platform designed to facilitate collaboration between professionals and researchers in the cultural heritage sector, enabling them to modernise their workflows and processes. This platform will provide access to cutting-edge data, scientific and training resources, and advanced digital tools, all developed collaboratively by the cultural heritage community to meet its specific needs. ECHOES will integrate the currently fragmented communities within the cultural heritage (CH) sector, bringing together diverse stakeholders from various fields and disciplines into a cohesive community centred on digital commons.

ECHOES’s main strength lies in its consortium, which is ideally placed to represent the wider community, as it comprises 15 umbrella organisations representing over 1,000 organisations across Europe and a variety of disciplines. Ultimately, the project will create a network of key stakeholders from institutions within the cultural heritage sector, including a robust scientific and professional network, and will be open to collaborative efforts from a broad community of users.

Finanziato dall’Unione europea. Le opinioni e i punti di vista espressi sono tuttavia esclusivamente quelli degli autori e non riflettono necessariamente quelli dell’Unione europea. Né l’Unione europea né l’autorità erogatrice possono essere ritenute responsabili al riguardo.