Interview with Friederike Wenisch, teacher at Gymansium Altona and editor at DigitallearningLab who tried out the helloguide chatbot automation platform with her students.
Where have you heard about Helloguide?
My first encounter with helloguide was on a trip to the Digital Heritage Conference in Kiel in September last year where Ines gave me a lift to Kiel. I was instantly inspired by the idea to use chatbots for cultural mediation – and hooked on trying this technology with my awesome S3-course in the subject Religion.
You had the idea to use the Chatbot automation platform with your students. What is the project about?
At the moment, I teach the subject „Jesus Christ“ in S3 (11th grade). Churches are the Christian centres and through their art and interior, they give us access to our belief. A lot of people find churches just beautiful – they do not understand the symbolism and the stories behind the interior.
In this project, I want to solve this problem using the main church St Katharinen in Hamburg as an example. The chatbot lets the church speak and tells the stories behind paintings and objects.
What was the feedback of your students? Was it easy for them to develop the storytelling and create the content?
The students` feedback was consistently positive. A little sceptical at the beginning as they could not imagine the end result, they quickly got into it. They developed the content themselves, produced texts, audios, videos and images and made a story with some quiz functions. I uploaded it in the helloguide chatbot automation platform. It was at that point they realized that they could present their work to other students, friends and also to a broader public – all on the smartphone. Same with me!
What were your experiences with the chatbot automation platform? What worked well, what can be improved?
Two things: The option to upload a photo or video at the very beginning was not possible. Also I would have liked to have a file structure for those exhibits with a lot of information and for adding information later on. Otherwise, the system worked intuitively. It was fun for me and the students – and soon hopefully for all visitors who try it out themselves: The church St Katharinen is about to print a postcard so that everyone who enters the church can use this chatbased tour guide.
If you want to try it out yourself, just scan this QR code
or use this link:
https://webchat.helloguide.ai/webchat?page_id=04e703c0-055b-11e9-ad4c-eb6f070a66e3