Teaching History Online
Number 3: February, 2001
Contents
Introduction
Education
Guardian
Wolverhampton Grammar School History Website
Laisterdyke High School
History Website
Teaching
History Online Group
Six
of the Best
Teachers
Evaluating Educational Multimedia
Trenches
on the Web
Women's
Suffrage Movement in the United States
The
BBC History Magazine
Introduction
Spartacus
Educational will be publishing Teaching
History Online every month.
The newsletter will include news, reviews of websites and articles
on using ICT in the history classroom. Members of the mailing list
are invited to submit information for inclusion in future editions
of Teaching
History Online. In this way we hope create
a community of people involved in using the internet to teach history.
John Simkin
spartacus@pavilion.co.uk
Education
Guardian
Today sees the launch of a
new resources section for teachers, parents and students. Every week,
Education Guardian
will produce five pages of resources covering key stages one to four.
In the weekly secondary school section, Guardian Education has teamed
up with Learn, the provider of
some of the best learning resources on the Internet, and Channel 4's
First Edition, a current affairs programme for 9-13 year-olds. Each
week they will be creating two multimedia lessons on topical
subjects. In today's Guardian there is also the educ@guardian
supplement with several very good articles on ICT training. Check
out also two articles in the Education
Guardian by Carmel
Fitzsimmons and Bob
Hewitt on why they are leaving the teaching profession. Unless
the government deals with the issues raised by Fitzsimmons and Hewitt
the teacher shortage will only get worse.
Wolverhampton Grammar School History Website
One of the most impressive
school history websites on the Internet belongs to
Russel Tarr at Wolverhampton
Grammar School.
The site started off two years ago as a portal to other sites. Russel
soon found this constraining and has since focused on creating online
interactive lessons. The website now contains: (1) interactive quizzes
in which students are given feedback on their answers by the computer;
(2) decision-making games in which students are in role as a historical
character (Battle
of Hastings) or are asked key questions about their beliefs (Protestant
or Catholic?); (3) sourcework exercises in which students insert/delete
bias (Thomas
Becket), cut and paste information into appropriate categories
(Death
on the Railways) or analyse the meaning of a source as oppose
to its description (Tudor
Portrait Mystery); (4) In depth investigations in which students
analyse various interpretations of a key event to come up with a full
interpretation (Causes
of World War II and the Russian
Revolution).
Laisterdyke
High School
Another outstanding school
history website is run by Dan
Moorhouse of Laisterdyke
High School. It
started out giving out given details of the department, course outlines
and a few links. In the last six months it has grown rapidly and now
contains material on the Roman
Empire, Edward
the Confessor, Protest
Movements, the First
World War,
Nazi
Germany,
D-Day and
Islamic
Civilisations. There is also an impressive section on Medicine.
School websites are good for local history and Dan is building up
a collection of work on the
History of
Bradford.
Teaching
History Online Group
Several history teachers have got together
to form the Teaching
History Online Group. The plan is to create a website where classroom
teachers can go to find online lessons. So far lessons have been provided
by Russel Tarr (Wolverhampton
Grammar), Andrew Field (Neale-Wade
Community School), Dan Moorehouse (Laiserdyke
High School), Chris Trueman (Sackville
Community School), Deborah Sheward (SchoolsNet),
Rachael Norman (SchoolsNet),
Jim Fanning (Newhaven
School) and John Simkin (Spartacus
Educational and Learn). Email
John Simkin (spartacus@pavilion.co.uk)
if you have produced online lessons and want to join the Teaching
History Online Group.
Six
of the Best
Six of the Best is a series of
topic cards that highlights six good websites that can be used in
the classroom. Produced by teachers and published by Learn,
they are being sent to all schools in Britain. They are also available
from the Guardian/Learn stand
at the BETT Exhibition being
held in London this week. There are ten cards for history and topics
covered include William the Conqueror, Elizabeth I, The English Civil
War, Slavery, The Second World War, The Railways, The Factory System,
Women and the Vote, The Western Front and Race Relations in the United
States.
Teachers
Evaluating Educational Multimedia
Finding good websites for classroom
activities is a constant problem for teachers. It is therefore good
to discover that TEEM (Teachers
Evaluating Educational Multimedia) has created a website which contains
evaluations and case studies of websites written and researched by
teachers. All evaluators work to a framework that includes questions
such as: Who published it? Is it up-to-date? How quickly does it download?
Will your children be able to navigate the site with ease? Is it really
an educational site with classroom relevance or does it contain wonderful
ideas that are not relevant to the national curriculum?
Trenches
on the Web
Trenches on the Web
is an evolving project being developed by Mike Lavorone in the USA.
New material is being added all the time and this reflects the concerns
and interests of the people who use the site and are willing to send
information to the webmaster. Lavorone describes himself as the trench-keeper
("a history technician, not a historian, recording these events
with the tools currently available"). Students can explore a
wide variety of themes and topics. It is also possible to look at
certain issues in great detail. The range and display of statistics
in this website is especially impressive. The visitor is never allowed
to forget the human tragedy of this conflict and heart-rendering photographs
appear next to the tables and graphs on the screen.
Women's
Suffrage Movement in the United States
Women's
Suffrage Movement in the United States
is
the latest of the Spartacus
Educational Encyclopaedias.
Each entry contains a narrative, illustrations and primary sources.
The text within each entry is hypertexted to other relevant pages
in the encyclopedia. In this way it is possible to research individual
people and events in great detail. The sources are also hypertexted
so the student is able to find out about the writer, artist, newspaper,
organization, etc., that produced the material.
Women Campaigners:
Edith Abbott, Grace Abbott, Jane Addams, Susan Anthony, Emily Balch,
Mary Ritter Beard, Amelia Bloomer, Nellie Bly, Sophonisba Breckinridge,
Olympia Brown, Lucy Burns, Mary Ann Cary, Carrie Chapman Catt, Maria
Weston Chapman, Lydia Maria Child, Dorothy Day, Crystal Eastman, Elizabeth
Flynn, Margaret Fuller, Emma Goldman, Josephine Goldmark, Madeline
Breckinridge, Sophonisba Breckinridge, Angelina Grimke, Angelina Weld
Grimke, Sarah Grimke, Margaret Haley, Alice Hamilton, Frances Harper,
Juliet Ward Howe, Helen Keller, Florence Kelley, Julia Lathrop, Belle
LaFollette, Mary Livermore, Adella Logan, Mabel Dodge Luman, Mary
Mahoney, Maud Park, Helen Marot, Mary McDowell, Katharine McCormick,
Inez Milholland, Lucretia Mott, Agnes Nestor, Mary Kenney O'Sullivan,
Mary White Ovington, Alice Paul, Francis Perkins, Margaret Robins,
Jeanette Rankin, Edith Nourse Rogers, Eleanor Roosevelt, Josephine
Ruffin, Margaret Sanger, Rosie Scheiderman, Anna Howard Shaw, Elizabeth
Cady Stanton, Ellen Gates Starr, Alzina Stevens, Lucy Stone, Rosika
Schwimmer, Mary B. Talbert, Mary Church Terrell, Sojourner Truth,
Mabel Vernon, Fanny Garrison Villard, Lillian Wald, Ida Wells, Olivia
Washington, Anne Whitney, Frances Willard and Fanny Wright.
Women Artists and the Campaign:
Nina Alexender, Blanche Ames, Cornelia Barnes, Nell Brinkley, Edwina
Dumm, Rose O'Neill, Fredrikke Palmer, Mary Wilson Preston, Ida Proper,
Lou Rogers, Mary Sigsbee and Alice Beach Winter.
Journals and Magazines:
Women's Journal, Woman Voter, Woman Citizen and The Masses.
Organizations:
National Woman Suffrage Association, American Woman Suffrage Association,
National American Woman Suffrage Association, Congressional Union
for Woman Suffrage, Woman's Peace Party and National Consumers League.
Political Campaigns:
Anti-Slavery Society, Woman Suffrage, Prohibition and Child Labour.
Male Supporters of Women's Suffrage:
Frederick Douglass, William Du Bois, Charles Beard, Paul Kellogg,
Eugene Debs, Norman Thomas, Clarence Batchelor, John Bengough, Floyd
Dell, Max Eastman, Daniel Fitzpatrick, Rollin Kirby, Robert Minor,
John Reed, Boardman Robinson, Upton Sinclair, John Sloan and Art Young.
The BBC History Magazine
The BBC History Magazine is
published every month and costs £2.95. Its coverage of history
websites is currently disappointing. Very few articles have links
to websites and its monthly column, History on the Net, is unimpressive.
This week's author claims she could only find three websites on Charles
Dickens and all of them came from Japan. She is obviously using the
wrong search-engine. Each month the magazine puts three of its articles
online. The January edition provides online articles on the Palace
of Westminster, Music
and Italian Nationalism and the English
Civil War.
Please email John Simkin at spartacus@pavilion.co.uk
if you have information you want included in next month's edition
of Teaching
History Online.
