Welcome back!
The caffeine question of the day is this… What is your favorite tea latte? Comment below!
This week is a wrap-up of the Rainy Field Trip series. I hope you all enjoyed it, and hopefully, I can start making more series’ in the upcoming months! So without further ado, let’s get into it! This week is all about DIY history. What is that you say? These are projects that you can assign to your students to keep them engaged and interested in history. These can also help improve retention and researching skills. The project I am going to talk about specifically is Omeka. Let’s go!
So with Omeka, this site allows you to create your own digital exhibit. By going to Omeka, you are able to sign up for a free trial or subscribe to the platform. After this, you are able to begin creating an exhibit. This requires you to activate and configure your exhibit and configure plugins. After configuration, you are able to create the different pages you want for your exhibit. If you are familiar with metadata data and metadata creation, this could be a dream or a nightmare, depending on your views of metadata. If you are not familiar with metadata here is a quick guide on what you’ll do next.
Each Exhibit and Item that you create and upload will then have a few boxes that need to be answered. These mainly revolve around the information about the exhibit and the item itself. A description, who created it, when it was created, how it was created, etc. You can think of it as a different way of citing your sources for your research. After filling in all the information, you are able to add to your exhibit by adding Pages and customize the Theme of the collection. Once you are done creating your exhibits, you are then able to save and publish your work!
This platform allows students to be both the student and teacher as they are given the opportunity to teach the class about their specific exhibit. Not only that, they are able to enhance their research and critical thinking skills while creating them. This is seen with the inclusion of their images, as they create metadata for each image, as well as the importance behind the image to the exhibit. Along with these skills, it gives students some free will and a chance to get creative when it comes to designing an exhibit. So whether it is based behind a set group of themes within history for groups to pick from, or specific eras or events in history, creating a digital exhibit is such a fun tool to have in your toolkit when it comes to engaging classroom activities!
And just like that, the first series of the blog has officially ended! I hope you enjoyed it, and are looking forward to more series’ to appear in the future. Like always, if you have any questions, comments, or concerns, be sure to comment below or send a message via the contact page.
Until next time!
THE CAFFEINATED HISTORIAN 