Anne Frank's Story Goes Online
November 8, 2005
The Anne Frank Web guide went online on Monday. The Web site, spearheaded by an initiative of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and the Anne Frank Center in Berlin, is aimed at pupils in both primary school as well as the first years of high school.
Students can use the source material to complete projects about Anne Frank as well as World War II. Specifically the Web site includes texts, photographs, film clips, a historical timeline, 360-degree rotating panoramas of the secret attic in which Anne and her family hid from the Nazis and audio clips The deeper a pupil enters the site, the more detailed the information becomes.
An evolving project
The European Anne Frank Guide can be regarded as a 'website in the making.' The source bank is regularly supplemented with new material -- especially the amount of country-specific information about World War II which will significantly increase over the course of time.
The Web guide currently provides multi-language information for students from seven countries: Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy, Austria, and the Czech Republic. A Dutch version of the Web site has been running since May of this year. The point of this international cross-referencing is to help students better understand the perspectives of their neighboring countries concerning the tumultuous times surrounding World War II.
Enthusiastic support
The Web guide is meant to be suitable for students of different levels and backgrounds. Even children with learning difficulties are encouraged to participate. The site offers ready-made ideas for a subject plus accompanying sources, but students also have the freedom to think up their own subjects and then look for the material.
Teachers speak, among other things, about the sites clear layout and multi-topic flexibility. "It’s a logical and efficient means for students to not only access information from this time period," said one teacher from the Sophie Scholl School in Berlin. "It also enables them to apply their own person experiences to ideas about discrimination, politics, literature and xenophobia."