Friday, 15 May 2015

New website launched!

Today, LHSA launched a brand new website packed with educational resources, images, and audio visual material from our UNESCO-recognised HIV/AIDS collections: www.hiv-aids-resources.is.ed.ac.uk. Click here to find out more about the background of the project.

The website mainly consists of educational resources that are linked to the Curriculum for Excellence and are for use with school children aged between 12 and 15 by teachers and youth group workers. Three subjects themes from the Curriculum for Excellence are covered on the website: Expressive Arts, Health and Wellbeing, and Social Studies. On the home page, you may recognise the pink bus from the ‘Take Care’ campaign. We chose this to go on the first page as we felt it matched the three main subject themes.
 Screen shot of the home page
Firstly, Expressive Arts, the bus was a part of a well designed, highly visual campaign which used a distinctive logo and the colours blue and pink on a wide range of media. Secondly, Health and Wellbeing, the bus was used to promote the message “Take care of the one you love” and raised awareness on how HIV was transmitted. Lastly, Social Studies, the statement on the bus “AIDS concerns us all” aimed to dispel the myths surrounding HIV and reduce the stigma associated with the disease and was used throughout the ‘Take Care’ Campaign.

This main page leads directly to the resources themselves. Each subject theme has five educational resources linked to it. You can download the resources as a pdf. The images and audio-visual files associated with the resources can also be downloaded here, either singly or together as a zip file.


Screen shot of the resource page

Each resource consists of four pages. The first page is a cover sheet that gives a short introduction to what the resource covers and which experiences and outcomes the resource matches. The next page gives some useful background information to the resource and images. An image sheet containing the relevant images is provided for quick reference followed by a section that suggests activities based on the items in the collection.
Activities in the resources are varied and include starter activities such as true and false quizzes, mind maps and discussion points. They also provide ideas for projects such as making interactive computer games using Powerpoint software, designing radio adverts and postcards, and launching a health promotion campaign.
Other pages on the website include a historical context page, which gives information on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Edinburgh from the early 1980s to present day. An image bank is also provided on the website. This way users can get an overview of the images and click on specific tags that will take them back to the related resource.
 
 Screen shot of the image bank
So far, we’ve had great feedback for the website. Everyone agrees that the educational potential for the HIVAIDS collections is huge and the highly visual material in the collections will greatly appeal to school children. We hope that this website will help to promote these fantastic collections to a wider and more diverse audience and inspire educational professionals to use archives in the class room.

Check out the website at www.hiv-aids-resources.is.ed.ac.uk and let us know what you think!
 
...hot off the press....
Emily giving her presentation at the website launch this afternoon!
 
 
 
 

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