ICT and historical skills

The rapidly changing present-day information society creates new needs and opportunities for the history teacher. He can help young people to develop the skills necessary for life-long learning. The heuristic methods and the critical analyses of texts (written texts but also images, moving pictures etc.) characteristic for the historical discipline are easy transferable to other domains of knowledge acquisition. The use of information and communication technology in history instruction can help to reach the former aim. The principles of hypertext and hypermedia permit the learner (in the spirit of constructivism) to decide for him- or herself which strategy to use to reach a preconceived goal. The role of the teacher changes from that of a provider of information into that of a guide during the pupils learning process. In the following article you can read about the instructional principles, the technological design and the first results of the Maerlant-project, a project in which the researchers try to reconcile history teaching, history as a scientific discipline and ICT