Dan Lyndon

John, I would love to use both links to Spartacus and upload any teaching material that you produce to the new website. I am aware of the debate about Equiano's birthplace and equally aware of the controversial interpretation put forward by Carretta. I understand that many UK and US historians are very dismissive of his work, and equally argue that it is immaterial where he was born, but more important to look at his role in the anti-slavery movement.

Andy, oh so negative. Mind you so was I until I went to a talk by Jerome Freeman of QCA and he was very impressive. The vocational element comes more in the assessment of the course, with students being encouraged to use a lot more ICT. An example he gave would be to design a website for a local museum. What impressed me the most was the philosophy behind the move, which was very similar to the SHP approach. A global, national and local focus with a real effort to move into areas of history that have been moved off the mainstream curriculum at KS4. I was also impressed by the emphasis on parity with 'academic' GCSEs, with a strong focus on historical skills and making sure that this absolutely is not about 'dumbing down'.

I have been working on a new website http://www.blackhistory4schools.com which will be launched in the first week of March (so there is nothing to see yet). I have got the material that I have been writing over the last few years, as well as the webquests I have written and links to appropriate websites to post up, however I would like a lot more. Therefore This is a call for material on any topics related to black and asian history that you have produced that I can add to the collection of resources I have. I would prefer it if the content was British but if there is work related to Black Peoples of the Americas that would be good too. Also if you have recommendations of websites then please post them here. I won't post my email here but if you post a short description of what you have, I will pm/email you about it. The success of this website depends on the contributions that I receive. Ideally blackhistory4schools should be able to achieve for multicultural history what this website has achieved for us all. A big Thank You in advance of your support on this project

Nice plenary Andy, but you could also tighten up your further reading by maybe selecting some of the links rather than having the whole list from historylearningsite, I think my boys would be running scared from that. Are most of your lessons in an ICT room? you seem to teach so much ICT led lessons. Great stuff.

Now that is one sexy looking webpage - I really like the boxes, how did you do that? - are the pictures a bit small? would it be possible to enlarge them when you rollover? As for the activity, I think that my boys might need a bit more scaffolding for the activity - I know you have given questions in each box (which is more effective than hovering over the information - all my boys do is cut and paste or keep the mouse over the top and copy!), but maybe there needs to be another page that can be linked to that has a bit more written info on each section. Excellent work sir.

And what about the Toussaint L'Ouverture connection?

A very interesting point. Is this book easily available in English? I would guess that this was connected to the revolts led by Toussaint L'Ouverture - would that be right John?

I have no doubt that it is an excellent website, and worthy of a link, but I can't comment cos I've never used it since it went pay per view

Great stuff Andy as usual, but as you will see from your posting here you have a typo on the first page and one of your links doesn't work - History study stop - maybe you could replace it with comptonhistory!. I really like the glossary of key terms and a good link to John D's VAK revision techniques - why have you kept ActiveHistory on there if it's subscription? Keep up the good work - my boys are using your site to revise - saves me having to do the hard work!

The one thing that you have not mentioned is the importance of the software. I do all of the planning and writing of my material for my IW on my PC at home (I use Activstudio 2). So I can spend as much (or little) time as I choose getting to know the software. Sp long as the IW uses the same software package as me I can be in any room in my school and teach the same lesson.

both - get them up scribbling away, moving around, rubbing out, highlighting, rearranging etc, much more fun. I was at this inset yesterday where most people said that all they did was show ppoint presentations and the odd dvd. BORING!

Only if they are 'interactive' otherwise they are just a wide screen television or powerpoint projector.

Easy tiger

Indeed I have purchased the CD Rom - now why would you be promoting that Andy? I was thinking more along the lines of creative ways of making the flipcharts interactive or engaging.

I have a promethean whiteboard with Activstudio2 and want to jazz up my box of tricks. Has any one got any good tips?

This gives access to higher order thinking - it is a synthesis task - once the pupils have produced their own in pairs they have to merge their slides and as a group come up with the key points in a summary introductory slide. The merging is relatively straightforward but hopefully there should be good discussion for the new slide.

I shall make a distinctly diplomatic 'no comment' here

Are you lurking Mr W? I am not sure what they meant - i have hardly any adverts and none on the page I linked to so it must be yours, capitalist pig.

Indeed they will, and in fact I nicked the idea from that very page!!!

For all you medicine through time people out there I have created a higher order thinking task on the renaissance here. Pupils have to work in pairs to produce a 2 slide PowerPoint presentation on either Pare, Vesalius or Harvey and then in groups of 6 have to merge their material and write an introductory slide summarising each individual. The material comes from the webpages on comptonhistory which are from the BBC Medicine through time website (thanks to Andy Walker for archiving them on his historygcse.org website)

You can hear some of the podcasts that my students produced here just scroll down and enjoy!

http://www.comptonhistory.com/misc/misc.htm A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I was working on linking the NC levels with Blooms Taxonomy (the triggers that Lesley Ann provided in her seminar on Thinking Skills on the History Teachers Discussion Forum). I have now completed this and you can see it on my website above. I think this has real potential, especially as this was also done in Geog and RE and potentially will be introduced across the whole school. Any improvements will be most welcome.

I have created my first podcast which, if you are in need of a serious laugh, you can hear here (scroll down to the bottom and it's called black death podcast)

I am experimenting with my first podcast tomorrow - my students will be researching and producing a podcast about the Black Death using software from http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ It is unbelievably easy to use, it literally took me 5 minutes to make my first recording and export it to an MP3 file. Big up to Donald Cummings for directing me to the website.

Well it must be my browser at home as it is fine (using IE) at work. I shall look at whether I have the latest updates.