Education/News/March 2022/Wikimedia Israel cooperates with Yad Vashem in developing a training course for teachers
Wikimedia Israel cooperates with Yad Vashem in developing a training course for teachers
During November and December 2021, we planned and carried out with Yad Vashem (the Holocaust remembrance center) a first-of-its-kind teachers’ training program. The target audience was history teachers who participated in the Tamar program of the state’s religious educational system. These teachers were highly experienced in leading students in research works that could serve as alternatives to certain Bagrut (matriculation) exams. The program included lessons about WP’s interface and its community, the reliability of information sources, as well as practical work, including writing an expansion for a he-wp article. This experience was made possible thanks to the Yad Vashem team’s hard work in preparing topics and appropriate information sources. The program also included a tour in Yad Vashem, which exposed the teachers to a lesser-known corpus of knowledge resources.
At the end of the course, the teachers were asked to write lesson plans about various subjects related to the “Students Write Wikipedia” project, which resulted in a new repository of lesson plans that would help future teachers of this program. The program received excellent feedback from both the participating teachers and our partners, the Yad Vashem team, and the Ministry of Education’s representative. Hopefully, the teachers who graduated from this course will take a leading role in implementing this program in their classes and allow its expansion, deepening, and optimization.