The National Library of Spain and the Public Entity Red.es launch the educational portal BNEscolar

The presentation of the BNEscolar project took place on July 2. The event was attended by the Secretary of State for Education, Alejandro Tiana, the General Director of the National Library of Spain (BNE), Ana Santos, and the General Director of Red.es, David Cierco.

BNEscolar is a portal aimed at the educational community where you can find digital content created using the documentary collection of the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica. The project, developed by the BNE and Red.es, is framed in BNElab, a space that concentrate BNE's new digital strategy. This portal and all its resources aim to promote access and reuse of the library's digital resources, showing the Spanish-speaking educational community formulas and methodologies that allow creating new content for its teaching application.

Specifically, BNEscolar is aimed at teachers and pre-university students, with special focus on the last levels of Primary and Secondary Education. All of them will have at their disposal various contents and functionalities:

• Search engine. After a detailed analysis, the BNE has selected those contents of the Hispanic Digital Library that have a high potential to be used as learning resources, in accordance with the educational programs of the formal education. These contents have been enriched with metadata that facilitate their search. Through a search engine, users can filter the contents according to different parameters, such as the educational level or the subject they are most appropriate for. Other filters that are included are authors, languages or types of resources (texts, illustrations, audios, etc.).
• Didactic sequences. Teachers and students have at their disposal didactic sequences with different activities and challenges to resolve using BNE resources. All the contents are accompanied by methodological guides for its use in the classroom. The objective is to promote project-based learning, and the active and collaborative participation of students. For example, one of the didactic sequences is a role-playing game for a better knowledge of the Semana Trágica: Students will have to put themselves in the shoes of the people involved and recreate the events that took place in real time using Twitter or Instagram.
• Interactive challenges. One aspect that has been taken into account from the origin of the project is the incorporation of playful elements that invite to work with the BNE resources. Two applications have been created based on the reuse of its contents: a digital escape game, located at the San Petesburg Arts Academy, and a geolocalized question-answer game.
• Workshops and videos. Through different workshops, students will be able to deepen in a selection of contents in a practical way, using digital tools. In addition, a series of short videos have been included to review the contents in a fun and entertaining way.
• My BN Escolar. BNEscolar also includes a personal section for teachers where they can organize their resources and create collections. The BNE invites teachers to reuse the materials of the Library to develop their own contents or dynamic sequences

The portal has been valued, in a first pilot phase, by a set of educational centers. This collaboration has allowed to validate the contents so that they respond to the technical and curricular needs of the students and teachers. Now a second phase begins, in which a broad dissemination is planned through social networks in order to reach the entire educational community. The expansion of the BNEscolar contents is also underway. Developing BNEscolar has taken months of work. BNEscolar expands, develops and improves an initial proposal.

BNEscolar joins the list of projects developed by the BNE in favor of opening and reusing our cultural heritage, such as comunidad.bne.es or ChefBNE. On this occasion, the focus is on  education and the informational competence of teachers and students, a key aspect to be critical, creative and autonomous citizens in the digital society.