The Philips’ Revolution (LS-ES-258)
When visiting a city, I like to document myself and visit those museums that can enrich my teaching and, therefore, allow me to transmit to my students some of the curiosities I have found during my stay.
One of the last trips I made in Europe was to Eindhoven (Holland), to visit the Philips museum, a famous brand of household appliances. To me, the museum was a discovery! It is closely related to electricity and is one of the most enjoyable topics to discover.
The electricity revolution
In our first activity, we make use of digital heritage to guide our secondary students, 11 and 12 years old, on a journey through the evolution of electricity and its applications. To do that we will study the history of one of the most important electrical companies (Philips), and locate in the Europeana Platform various electrical appliances, allowing our students to produce a poster and a presentation summarizing their work.
Explained in an exhibition
Students have to analyse the resource presented by the teacher and synthesize its content. Then they have to work in groups of 4 in an organized way, to later elaborate a small exhibition of the concepts acquired to the rest of their classmates. To achieve this goal, students must work cooperatively and delimit individual responsibilities so that the result is visible, fruitful and communicate in a coherent way what they have learned, all using digital tools. Each team must develop a draft plan that will be their guide for the lesson. On a Padlet students will write a short sentence about the work they will do (if they prefer, they can record a short video and publish it on the Padlet)
Featuring videos, presentations and posters
According to their investigation and the draft designed previously, students will select all the information needed to create the final product (video, oral presentation, scientific poster with QR connections). They must pay attention to copyright issues regarding the data they collect. A Quiz can be used to evaluate students’ inputs to the work (optionally this can be done via Kahoot or Google forms). The teacher can decide on topics that are mandatory for the students to explore the activity and that can be included on the quiz.
This type of activity is really motivating for our students! They have to expose the concepts through digital tools, which allows them to be creative while learning about a topic, even without being aware of it.
Would you like to know more about this learning scenario? You can download it below:
Did you like this learning scenario? You might also like:
- The wind is all around us: let’s make electricity by Carlos Cunha
- How did people learn to measure time by Ryszard Markowicz
- Why don’t we create a museum? by Aarón Bernárdez
The featured image used to illustrate this article has been found on Europeana Collections and belongs to the public domain.