The acting Secretary of State for Education and FP, Alejandro Tiana, has presided over the presentation of the educational portal BNEscolar along with Ana Santos Aramburo, director of the National Library of Spain (BNE), and David Cierco Jiménez de Parga, general director of Red.es.
BNEscolar will make part of the Spanish bibliographic and documentary heritage available to the entire educational community. This project is presented as an invitation to collaboration, to find new alliances between heritage and education between memory institutions and teaching centers.
BNEscolar will represent for the educational community a new form of access and visualization of information that will encourage the creation of innovative formulas for the use of content and new use models for their teaching application, thus reversing this value to the whole society.
Alejandro Tiana pointed out that "BNEscolar focuses on the training and information competence of both teachers and students, key competence to be critical, creative and autonomous citizens in the digital society, helping them to become familiar with the use of sources primary information so that in this way they are not only consumers of online cultural heritage, but active participants with their own voice ".
The director of the BNE stressed during the presentation that "the resources of the National Library of Spain are put at the service of teachers because we know that today the learning of children and young people is based on encouragement, openness to participation and in the promotion of intellectual curiosity. "
For his part, the CEO of Red.es has highlighted that "with this project, the BNE and Red.es go a step further in the opening of public information, becoming a benchmark for the reuse of cultural data."
An educational portal of high cultural, economic and social value
The BNEscolar project is framed in BNElab, a space where the new digital strategy of the BNE is concentrated, which has a patrimonial fund in digital format of about 220,000 works in the public domain, representing around 40 million freely accessible pages. Internet.
This learning environment will have countless resources as didactic sequences to work in the classroom; interactive challenges to test the knowledge and ingenuity of the students; workshops to deepen in a practical way in certain subjects; short videos to review content of the curriculum in a pleasant way; methodological suggestions guides for its use in the classroom; and playful elements and games; among others.
The educational portal is oriented to pre-university regulated education, in particular to the last levels of primary and secondary education. The technological environment will encourage students to feel motivated for the optimal use of resources, the creation of new content and cooperative learning with students at their school or others.
BNEscolar has been tested in a first phase by a set of educational centers thanks to which it has been possible to adjust and validate the suitability of the technological environment as well as the achievement of curricular objectives.
The collaboration between BNE and Red.es, established since 2012, has allowed to allocate more than 8 million euros to the digitization of cultural resources. In 2016, a specific agreement was signed to promote the reuse of the patrimonial fund in digital format of the Library, in different areas. BNEscolar, one of the projects launched under this agreement, has had a budget of nearly half a million euros.