Resources

Kim Thomas

It may seem paradoxical, but modern technology has a great deal to offer students of history; indeed, ICT is already used more in the school history curriculum than in any other subject, according to the educational consultant John Simkin. John's involvement in the European History E-Learning Project (E-HELP), an EU-funded project that will make recommendations about the use of technology in history teaching, has given him the opportunity to look at best practice in the member states.

The obvious starting point for school history teachers is the world wide web, which holds a wealth of historical documents previously available only to people with the time to trudge down to specialist libraries to dig them out. Take Learning Curve, a Government website that contains documents from the National Archives. Terry Haydn, a Reader at the University of East Anglia and an expert in history education, cites a graph on that website dating from 1910, that shows how the weight of working-class schoolchildren dropped dramatically in the school holidays when they didn't have school dinners. As he points out, that simple graph is a simple but powerful illustration of the consequences of poverty.

Terry also cites the free online archives of newspapers like The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph, which can provide instant access to articles by distinguished historians and commentators. And then there's John's own site, Spartacus Educational, a constantly evolving resource. John, who used to write history textbooks, set up the site when he realised that the format of the textbook was forcing him to condense and simplify complex issues. Now he can put up as much information as he wants, and modify it as new information (often supplied by people, or the relatives of people, mentioned on the site) is provided. After John put up a section on Watergate, he was contacted by one of the Watergate burglars, Alfred Baldwin, who disagreed with his interpretation. John allowed Baldwin to write his own account and put it on the site.

The difference this makes, says Terry, is that history need no longer be about the transmission of facts or one-sided interpretation of those facts: "History teaching today isn't all about knowing about the substantive past and getting a sense of identity, it's also about getting students to handle information intelligently. We're in the era of spin and the very sophisticated manipulation of information. New technology is fantastically helpful in being able to get them to understand things like interpretation and enquiry." School students learn to behave like real historians, carrying out research and interpreting the information they find.

The internet also makes collaboration between students possible, even if they are in different schools or different countries. As a group exercise, they can create wikis, with each student contributing to a different part of the site. Or they can work together on a particular project: John cites a child labour simulation exercise on his own site, in which each child takes the part of either a child in a factory, a factory owner, or a reporter campaigning against child labour. The children research why their character holds that particular view and then answers questions from the rest of the class (posing as a parliamentary committee) about that view. This exercise, he says, has been carried out with school students in France, England and the West Indies, all participating at the same time.

History is about argument, and the ability to test one's ideas out on others. The internet offers opportunities to do this in abundance. The International Education Forum has sometimes been the site of discussions between school pupils and still-living historical figures, says John: in one case a 17 year-old girl who had fled the Soviet Union was able to debate communism with Nathaniel Weil, a former member of the American communist party who had become an informer for the FBI and testified against Alger Hiss. The internet's ability to bring together two people whose paths would never otherwise have crossed is, as John says, "mind-boggling".

Terry points out that sometimes very simple technologies can be extremely effective. In the teaching of history, images can have a powerful impact: when he researched history teachers' views on technology, he found that the one piece of technology they valued above all others was television and video. Imagery can be anything from a series of pictures of Queen Elizabeth II that demonstrate how representations of the monarchy have changed over 50 years to a short film of an atom bomb going off - something Terry describes as "jaw-droppingly intense and very moving."

Modern digital video technology gives students the opportunity to create something much more personal and engaging than the traditional essay. As part of his work in the E-HELP project, for example, Terry met a teacher who had asked his pupils to create a biography of a relative by interviewing them, and using Windows Movie Maker to edit the interview. In one extraordinary example, one girl went to Russia to interview her grandmother, who was a tank commander in World War II. The history teacher Ben Walsh, given a difficult class in Leeds, taught them to use Movie Maker to edit presentations on the Berlin Wall, adding their own commentaries and special effects. "The only discipline problem was getting them out of the classroom at the end," says Terry. "They all wanted to stay."

It's a far cry from traditional teaching of history and, as Terry acknowledges, we still have a long way to go before this learner-centred approach to technology becomes the norm. Technology is still often used unimaginatively, he says: in one school, the pupils became so fed up with the use of PowerPoint that they drew up a petition to protest about it and took it to the headteacher. There's a danger, too, that pupils will view the information they find on the internet uncritically, and the teacher's job is to make sure that doesn't happen: "Part of historical education in the 21st century should be about teaching children to understand that the internet is not the ultimate repository of wisdom and truth."

John and Terry share a view of the future in which history students take an active role in their own learning. As John puts it: "I see the internet being used as if the kids were PhD students - they will take a thesis and test it out by looking at the material."