The LEARNING CENTER

Since summer 2018, there is a new learning offer on the website of Museum und Park Kalkriese: the learning center. It offers four exciting learning modules on Romans, Germanic tribes, archaeology and research, as well as Kalkriese and the Varus Battle. Each module includes information and task sheets - and the two presenters, Oskar and Sophie, also have plenty of questions. The teaching materials can be downloaded free of charge and are suitable for teachers and students at lower secondary level.

Starting in 2019, the learning center will be expanded. Together with school partners from the city and district of Osnabrück and the Osnabrück Media Center, a project is to be created that combines archaeology and modern media and provides teachers and students with a program for competence-oriented media education. In short: Excavation Camp 2.0

The digital transformation is changing our lives, our schools and the way we learn. Media are playing an increasingly important role here. What opportunities does digitization offer, where are the limits, perhaps even the dangers, and quite simply: Which medium is suitable for what? Schools are supposed to answer these questions, but teachers also have to familiarize themselves with the media possibilities first. Using the example of an archaeological excavation, we therefore want to learn which media we can usefully employ for what, how to research critically and present research results professionally, and how to create informative media products.

The program, to be developed together with the school partners and the media center, is aimed primarily at teachers and 5th and 6th grade students. The venue is the excavation camp in Kalkriese. Here, archaeological questions meet analog and digital tools.

In a staged live excavation, schoolchildren become archaeologists themselves and set out with trowel and brush in search of the secrets of the soil. With the help of digital media, they document work steps, research finds, interpret sources, conduct interviews with experts, discuss and present their findings on a media platform. It is important to distinguish clearly between circumstantial evidence and proof, arguments and speculation, facts and fiction. ExcavationCamp 2.0 will initially be developed and tested as a pilot project by school classes from the city and district of Osnabrück. Only when it has successfully passed the trial runs will it be officially launched. However, not only the students but also the teachers are to be actively involved in this project. In targeted training sessions, the possibilities of the learning center are discussed and concrete ways of using the teaching materials in the context of competence-oriented media education are developed.