Utilization of Digital Media to Improve The Quality and Attractiveness of The Teaching of History

Abstract

Historical learning serves a very important function, to waken the students’ awareness of the past society transformation and development process. Another function is to build historical perspective and awareness in finding, understanding, and explaining the nation’s self-identity amid the world transformation. However, the success of historical learning remains to be questioned until today. The most fundamental problem in historical learning is the attempt of improving the quality of learning process so that an effective, efficient and attractive result is achieved. One attempt of dealing with the low attraction and quality of learning is to use varying learning method and media. The best learning media for history is the object directly. The object/concrete object will give a real learning experience. However, in reality, as the technology develops, many object of historical learning is available in limited number in the field. This limitation may be due to space, time, and sensory power. Many historical learning objects are difficult to acquire because of its far distance, too big or too small size, complexity, or abstractness. For that reason, a learning media should be designed that can deal with such the limitation. One of it is by utilizes IT-based media. Some IT-based learning media that can be used are digital book, e-learning, learning multimedia and other formats. 

Through a sustainable research, it could be proved that through using digital media, teacher could teach history more joyfully. Using digital learning media can also invite the students to watch directly the form of historical heritage objects so that they will not only think or imagine them but they could watch them directly, finally, the quality of historical learning could improve or be more attractive.