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Terry Haydn

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  1. A great read, I have put it in my delicious bookmarks. For another great peice of writing, Google MLK's 'Letter from a Birmingham jail'. Best wishes, Terry
  2. I think it's interesting that most pupils (in the UK at least) now use at least some Web 2.0 applications, but (according to BECTa), far fewer teachers do. This would appear to be a missed opportunity. It is just technological diffidence or not knowing exactly what to do with blogs, wikis etc?
  3. I just wonder what people who use blog, wikis and VLEs think about having to have a website. Some people's wikis look great and are now very easy to set up. If you have to choose one application as your 'main' platform, which would be best?
  4. The potential for digital storytelling to enrich history lessons has increased since the original seminar as more and more schools/pupils are able to use Windows Moviemaker. It is now a more eminently 'doable' topic given many pupils' facility with Moviemaker. What would help would be some good examples to go with Johannes and Neal's tutorial on Moviemaker (www.innovativehistory.net). In the UK, it is now essential that all history teachers incorporate some element of family or local history into the curriculum at KS3; digital storytelling would be an ideal way of making this a powerful, worthwhile and interesting way of doing this.
  5. A bit of the problem is that not all the people who do podcasts think about making them interesting, they are sometimes just thinking of the technical 'being able to do a podcast' side of it. I have come across some which could reasonably be used as punishments for naughty pupils - this does not mean that they don't have potential, it's just that (as with PowerPoint) it's not [/just about technical expertise, it's the quality of thinking and ideas tha go into them.
  6. Dear Doug, If ever you have a bad day and are thinking 'Why do I bother?', just keep in mind that I have bumped into lots of history teachers who rave about your site (including Johannes) since you did the seminar. Best wishes, Terry
  7. I think it's important that we have some things in the project that are 'easy' or low level ICT and not too complex technically, as well as things that are 'cutting edge'. I reeally kike and admire Johannes and his work but I know in my heart of hearts I am never going to master Flash.
  8. Although it was over 3 years ago, I still vividly remember Janos' s presentation at Toulouse. Partly it was the inspired idea of using 'Inspirations' mindmapping software instead of (like nearly everyone else on the planet) PowerPoint, but also, the creativity and imagination in the way the software was used, using it to make the audience think, rather than just to transmit/bombard them with information. It was great to meet up with him again at the Bratislava seminar, and as at Toulouse, he had lots of good ideas about how to use ICT to improve teaching and learning in history.
  9. I think Neal makes a really important point; often it's not the technical functionality of the ICT application that delivers the learning but the imagination and creativity of the teacher in devising a well designed learning task or problem through the application - Neal is particularly good at this, and models it very powerfully in a session he does with my students. Above all, it's about using the technology to make learners think, to problematise the issue or topic in question, not just to 'tell them stuff' and deliver the answer. PowerPoint is a good example of an application that can be dire or brilliant, depending how it is used, and it's not about technical brilliance with PowerPoint, it's the ingenuity and imagination of the task design and questions posed by the presentation
  10. We have a VLE for our PGCE students; 3 years ago it was very underused - both by tutors and students, but now it is proving to be increasingly useful, and nearly all our students make regular use of it. One of the main uses is for students to share resources and ideas with each other. This might seem a prosaic use, and is not 'high-tech' or complex, but it makes one of the points I tried to make in my e-help seminar - one of the biggest advantages of using ICT in history teaching is that it helps teachers to quickly build up powerful 'collections' of high quality resources; what Ben Walsh has called 'building learning packages'. For me, this is by far the most important benefit of ICT for teachers.
  11. This is another thing I have changed my mind about; initially I thought that the amount of time needed to get to grips with Flash outweighed its potential usefulness, but Johannes has now persuaded me that if people have the patience to learn it, you can do worthwhile things with it that can problematise history and get them to think, if used in the right way.
  12. I have changed my views over time on this. I have a very basic website, and for a time I thought that it was redundant as there were so many more high quality websites, so why would anyone want to use mine? However, there is such a thing as 'niche marketing' and primitive though it is, there are one or two bits of my site that are of particular use to history PGCE students, which you can't get on any of the big history portals (for instance, a collection of quotations about the purposes of history, and materials for developing pupils' understanding of time). As well is this, it's a really helpful way of updating books and materials. What I find difficult to understand is how some people who have full time teaching jobs manage to keep up such fantastic sites on top of 'the day job'. I have great admiration for them.
  13. I thought Roy's seminar was great, with lots of good examples of how whiteboards might be used by history teachers, but I think there is still an argument to be had about whether whiteboards or wireless would be a better investment in ICT. There are still many history teachers (and probably I include myself in this list), who think that whiteboards give you lots of 'eye-candy' stuff - little tricks and gimmicks to aid pupil engagement (not in itself a bad or unnecessary thing), but that wireless gives easier access to the whole wealth of history resources on the internet, a much more valuable resource. I know whiteboards can also have internet access, but the point I am trying to make is that it is classroom internet access that is 'the big prize' for history teachers, not the facility to annotate pictures etc, and IWBs are expensive compared to data projector plus wireless. Am I on my own and something of a Luddite on this, or are there others in the history education community who have reservations about the rush to whiteboards?
  14. Reuben Moore's article in Teaching History No. 101 (2000) is still a very useful resource for getting pupils to understand the importance of interpretations, and links to the ways in which internet literacy ought to be a fundamental part of a historical education in the 21st century. It enables teachers (and pupils) to see the ways in which the internet can be used to develop an understanding of historical interpretations and provides some simple, easy to use and powerful examples. Should be required reading for the worrying number of politicians and policy makers who still go on about the importance of transmitting a 'clear and simple' list of events and people to pupils.
  15. What has happened over the last few weeks is awful on many levels. There must be hundreds of people involved in this in one way or another who are feeling intensely angry, upset or both. I feel sorry for the parents and pupils affected, who have lost a dedicated and inspirational teacher (this does not seem in any dispute and the evidence to support this seems overwhelming). Lots of lives will have been profoundly affected by Richard's sacking. I feel sorry for the teachers working at the school: the IST cannot be a happy place at the moment, the climate must be pretty awful. Things might not have been perfect in the period prior to Richard's dismissal, but over the past 2-3 years, I think that all of us involved with the E-Help project felt that it was a pleasure and a privilege to work with such a fantastic school, and such nice people - this came out of the blue for us. The E-Help project had been very successful and fulfilling; this affair throws things very much up in the air and has soured and possibly jeopardised the project - can anyone see us having a 'business as usual' meeting at Toulouse in March? But all these things, important though they are, seem to me to pale into insignificance compared to the profound injustice of what has happened to Richard. To be sacked from an institution for which you have worked so hard, and with such success, must feel horrible, and make him feel very bitter. So I think that what is more important than anything is to work as hard and constructively as possible to secure an outcome which is as helpful as possible for Richard. I hope that we can act with the intelligence, effectiveness and integrity which Richard has demonstrated over the past several years, both as leader of the project, as a teacher at the IST, and as an eminently decent human being.
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