Second World War Oral History Project

The main objective of this European project is to encourage school students to carry out interviews with people who experienced the Second World War. If possible contributions should include biographical details of the person being interviewed.

It is hoped that we will be able to produce a substantial resource for the study of the Second World War. It will be possible to search the database of contributions. Initially the material will be in English but in time we hope to have interviews in different languages.

I have posted a couple of interviews to show how it is hoped the project will work. It is hoped that others will also add their teacher/student interviews.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=88

John

My head of department has been running a very successful Veternas Day for the past 9 years - last year the BBC invited themselves along and took some photos for their site (part of the south west 'voices' campaign) see their page on us here!

This year we hope to do the same - but with the number of veterans diminishing due to ill health it is becoming difficult - so this is a wonderful idea!

Perhaps we could record some of our interviews on tape - turn them into MPEGs or WAV files and then post them for download - alternatively if webspace is an issue I could post them or the transcripts on thehistorysite.co.uk and we could link between the two!

Fantastic idea this forum - have just opened something similar but designed for kids on my webpage - the beauty is that the year 9 and 10 students want to get involved in running the site - but for security issues I would never hand out my FTP passwords, so by giving them a forum in which to talk and become 'moderators' makes them feel needed and useful (which they are!)

Ben Collinge
Chilton Trinity Technology College
Bridgwater

Oral history

As Ben has suggested the best medium is probably sound.

I have some of my mother's recollections from the blitz as sound recording on my pocket PC.

I will try to convert these to a suitable format for the web and post the URL

Maybe, but sound will be more difficult for students to use for their research. For example, see the debate going on at the moment at:

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=622