“This is better than Youtube”

May 16th 2008

Last Thursday, scolars and teachers of the Da Vinci College in Leiden presented the minister of education, Ronald Plasterk with a pilot of the Education Media Platform, a new platform for digital heritage.

With this platform students can search through digital sources of Sound and Vision, the National Archive and Naturalis. On the same platform, videos, photos and texts can be turned into papers and presentations. Teachers showed the minister how digitized heritage can form the foundation for abundant, self designed education material.



The students were enthusiastic about the platform. One of the students remarked: “this is much better than Youtube, because you can find everything compiled together and use it directly in a paper”. Minister Plasterk was very impressed by the fact that the platform uses as many open source components as possible and that it is possible to add sources oneself. The teachers are enthusiastic as well. Sietske van der Horst: “I can see that the students like to work in the online environment and it is a great advantage that I can improve my lessons with the lesson tools.” The Da Vinci College is one of the forerunners in the application and development of digital educational tools in the Netherlands.

The platform is still in its pilot phase; approximately twenty schools in the Netherlands are testing it for half a year. After these six months, September will mark the beginning of the development of a platform for the entire secondary education. The linking of various source data files and processing tools and the integration with electronic educational surroundings at schools form the unique characteristics of the platform.

The pilot was developed within the framework of the project Images for the Future, by Sound and Vision and Knowledgeland in collaboration with Kennisnet.

For more information, see: www.pilotomp.nl