e-Help Seminar 4 How can ICT support the development of students’
historical communication skills?
Toulouse 17-19 February 2005
The first section of the workshop summarised the
five different strands of ICT use in history that I have been involved with. In
each case there are advantages to history from the effective use of ICT. That
word ‘effective’ is very important, as sometimes ICT is not the best tool for
supporting learning in history. The first four strands were covered very
quickly. They are not new ideas, they do work but in some places history
teachers have been slow to adopt them. The reasons for history teachers not
using ICT are well documented. In the case of databases, the first strand
illustrated, the three main reasons are access to ICT facilities, a lack of
suitable software and the seeming technical difficulty of using data base
software. This workshop focussed upon a use of ICT that will not be so difficult
to adopt, the use of electronic whiteboards, an item of equipment that is
rapidly becoming available to many history teachers and which is easy to use.
The work described took place in schools in
West Sussex and the major example, improving students’ historical
communication skills in the context of the events of 1066, was led by
Kath Tipper of Bourne Community School. The work built upon the existing
good practice in literacy work. Students were helped to deconstruct an
historian’s written account of the Battle of Stamford Bridge. They were
then able to draw up an historians’ toolkit that they could use for
their own written account of the Battle of Hastings. This is explicitly
modelling the text type. The role that ICT played was very important. It
enabled the teacher to accurately focus on features of the text to point
out to students or for students to find for themselves. These features
were such things as the use of the past tense, connectives, strong
verbs, adjectives and adverbs to convey meaning and judgement. It was
the precision and accuracy that the ICT supported. In consequence
students learning was promoted as is evidenced with the two examples
illustrated. These two male students taken from the middle of the
ability range of the class in question clearly incorporated some of the
explicit writing toolkit ideas into their own writing. Moreover the
writing of the class was developing some colour and variety rather than
the rather anodyne style that can arise from too rigid a reliance on
writing frames and structure for writing.
An associated value of the use of ICT was that it helped students to
access a long and difficult source. There has been a tendency in
secondary history to move to ever shorter sources on the mistaken
assumption that they would be easier for students to use. However,
sometimes the shortening has the opposite effect as students’ have
insufficient context or grasp of the person behind a source. In this
case the historian quite clearly viewed Harald Hardrada as an
unsuccessful general and students were able to understand this as they
had enough material to go on. The work illustrated that students can use
a long source if they are given sufficient and appropriate support.
Finally the workshop gave a brief example of a different text type,
biography, to show the transferable nature of the work and concluded by
asserting that the arrival of the interactive whiteboard in so many
history classrooms presents us with an excellent opportunity to promote
the effective use of ICT in history teaching.
