Wow - a wiki that works!

Jane Shuyska from the Department of Education at Oxford Uni has been showing my year 9 class (whom I call Marwick cos I can't retain the complicated computer numbers that they go by in the school timetable) the wiki / mind map combination she's working on called "thinkspace".  Jane is doing some research as to how / if students use this combination to aid their learning in history.

We're getting to that time of year again when year 12's are leaving.  In the past I've done a questionnaire to find out how my teaching has impacted on their learning, whether they think that there's anything I should be focusing on.  This year I disposed of the questionnaire and instead we had a slice of cake and discussed what makes a good A level teacher.  I typed the results into bubbl.us (because I love it!).

I'm pausing during a busy parents' evening to consider what we've put into making ours successful.

I'm the KS coordinator for KS4, and have done much of the 'grunt' work for this evening, Simon (of www.ilovehistory.co.uk) is our HOD, and has helped me with the documentation and data for the evening.  I want to record, in case I need it in future (and in case anyone else needs it now) what we have done to make tonight successful.

After a recent discussion in our diploma group about the impenetrable language used by some (many) of our students, I came home to finish marking paper one of my year 11's mocks.  All of them, and I should emphasise that this is no exaggeration, every single one spelled 'gangster' as 'gangsta'.

So, it seems that there's a real need for students and teachers to know what each other mean.  As a result I offer this dictionary as a (developing) tool for enabling this cross curricular communication.

I've been asked to do some thinking about using video in the history classroom.  It seems to me that there are several ways.:

This Page will contain a set of links to material about using video in history lessons, and for homework.

I'm pleased to welcome PennyC and Alan D as guest bloggers, who are both History PGCE students from Reading University.

Your task is to discover enough to be able to cobble together some ideas for a lesson that will allow your year 9s to practise some historical skills. You're also going to have to gather some ideas about what makes a good "history through ICT" lesson, to buy you some time before you have to start cascading across the school (if it's possible to cascade across anything).

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Using Standard ICT Applications

You know that these applications work on the computers in your room.  You know that the students have used them before.  It seems sensible to base your lesson on one of the three main types of 'office' application.  You decide to look at each in turn:

• Word - a word-processor
• Excel - a spreadsheet program
• Power Point - a presentation program