The Société des Musées du Québec Gives the MMFA an Award for its Educational Platform Educart.ca
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) is proud to announce that the jury for the 2018 SMQ (Société des Musées du Québec) prizes has awarded it the Prize for Excellence, category 2, for its digital educational platform EducArt.ca.
Launched province-wide in September 2017, EducArt.ca is an innovative educational tool designed by the MMFA in collaboration with the school community. It offers secondary-school teachers and their students the chance to enrich the content of their courses in various subjects – from social studies to math and everything in between – using 350 artworks from the Museum’s encyclopaedic collection as a starting point.
Through the links that tie the artworks to aspects of the secondary curriculum, this free bilingual platform features 60 activities that address in a cross-disciplinary and original manner 17 social subjects and issues tailored to the different years and curricula of secondary school, directly harmonized with the Quebec Education Program.
EducArt.ca, developed by the MMFA with the support of over 750 partners and participants, is the fruit of four years of research that took the Museum’s team to 27 schools in the 17 administrative regions of Quebec, from the Lower St. Lawrence to the North Shore. 51 professionals from the MMFA, 50 educators and more than 600 secondary-school students and 55 experts from a variety of domains contributed to the creation of this ambitious educational platform.
Given every year, the SMQ prizes are intended to acknowledge, stimulate and reward excellence in the museum sector in Quebec and to pay tribute to achievements that have made a meaningful contribution to the advancement of museum practice in the province.
EducArt.ca internationally recognized for its success in Quebec schools
EducArt.ca has already reached thousands of secondary school students across every region of Quebec. To date, it has gathered 21,637 unique visitors and 408.581 page views. Over 1,850 users have created a profile on the platform, and 1,000 teaching professionals, including some 700 teachers and educational consultants from 10 school boards, have been trained in using EducArt.ca.
The SMQ’s 2018 Prize for Excellence, category 2 is yet another of the distinctions bestowed on EducArt.ca, which include a 2018 Patrimoine et Innovation(s) award from CLIC France in the category of children, education and youth. It was also a finalist for an OCTAS award, in the SME and public’s IT choice categories, from Réseau Action TI, which each year honours information technology and digital development projects that demonstrate outstanding creativity and innovation.
From left to right: Anne Charpentier, director of the Montréal Insectarium; Mélanie Deveault, Educational Projects Developer; Josée Duhaime, Head of Operations, Education and Wellness Department, MMFA; and Thibault Zimmer, Educational
Resource Designer; at the award ceremony of the 2018 SMQ prizes, held in Quebec City on October 3, 2018.
Photo : Marion Desjardins © SMQ.
