Skill Development in Teaching Ancient Greek: The Role of New Technologies

Rapid technological advances in recent years together with developments in world health (COVID-19 pandemic) laid bare the necessity for changes in the structure, methods and practices of the traditional teaching process. Information society has granted unprecedented access to data, enabling rapid processing and utilization. As a result, today’s students and future citizens need to obtain those skills that will allow them to process information and use it to solve real-life problems. Concurrently, the citizens of tomorrow should be able to rise to the challenges of a multicultural society. Education thus plays a decisive role, by fostering appropriate learning environments to enable students to cultivate cognitive, digital, metacognitive, social and communication skills. In this paper, a teaching scenario is proposed based on the above and according to the theory of constructivism. The scenario is meant to be implemented in the third grade of junior high school, specifically in the course on ancient Greek, in which students become acquainted with Euripides’ tragedy, “Helen.” This paper discusses the concept of e-learning and skills, as laid out in Binkley et al. (2012). It is noted that as part of e-learning to teach Ancient Greek, students have the opportunity both to obtain theoretical knowledge and to develop various skills, such as critical thinking, analysis and synthesis, teamwork, communication etc. Among other benefits, students will get to know ancient drama, interact with timeless concepts, develop their written and oral communication capabilities and acquire digital skills, by honing their ability to pursue independent study and work as part of a team in collaborative learning environments supported by these forms of communication. In conclusion, the prerequisites, benefits and challenges that may arise in implementing the teaching scenario in a digital environment are presented, as are means for more effective utilization of the scenario in teaching practice.