Using New Technologies to Enhance Teaching and Learning in History

Terry Haydn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135121068
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Nearly all history teachers are interested in how new technology might be used to improve teaching and learning in history. However, not all history departments have had the time, expertise and guidance which would enable them to fully explore the wide range of ways in which ICT might help them to teach their subject more effectively.

This much-needed collection offers practical guidance and examples of the ways in which new technology can enhance pupil engagement in the subject, impact on knowledge retention, get pupils learning outside the history classroom, and help them to work collaboratively using a range of Web 2.0 applications.

The chapters, written by experienced practitioners and experts in the field of history education and ICT, explore topics such as:

• how to design web interactivities for your pupils
• what can you accomplish with a wiki
• how to get going in digital video editing
• what to do with the VLE?
• making best use of the interactive whiteboard
• designing effective pupil webquests
• digital storytelling in history
• making full use of major history websites
• using social media.

Using New Technologies to Enhance Teaching and Learning in History is essential reading for all trainee, newly qualified and experienced teachers of history. It addresses many of the problems, barriers and dangers which new technology can pose, but it also clearly explains and exemplifies the wide range of ways in which ICT can be used to radically improve the quality of pupils' experience of learning history.

Chapter 1

What does it mean ‘to be good at ICT’ as a history teacher?

Terry Haydn

Introduction

There are several strands or facets of capability in the use of ICT in subject teaching (see Box 1.1), and most teachers are stronger in some strands than others. There are different ways of being ‘good at ICT’, but it is certainly not just a case of being accomplished in terms of technical capability, range of applications used, or amount of ICT use. In terms of a ‘bottom line’ in response to the question posed by the title, it might be the extent to which teachers exploit the potential of new technology to improve teaching and learning in history.

In a survey of the views of experienced teacher educators and mentors, only one out of 52 respondents defined competence in ICT in terms of a list of technical things that teachers should be able to do. In the words of one teacher educator:

It’s funny because in a skills set sense, I don’t have a list… I don’t think, they must be able to do PowerPoint, they must be able to upload a YouTube video and so on. It’s more that when we cover things… particular concepts… we consider how various bits and pieces of ICT might help to get the idea or concept across more effectively and they just bump into lots of ICT things along the way.

(OECD, 2010: 11)

Although awareness of the existence of ICT applications and basic technical competence in them were seen as ‘entry level’ factors to developing the capability to use ICT effectively in subject teaching, these factors were deemed less important than teachers having good ideas about ‘what to do’ with ICT applications once they had learned how to use them:

It’s about them thinking about what sorts of things you can do with Twitter, or PowerPoint or whatever.

It’s certainly not about how much they use ICT – PowerPoint and whiteboards often don’t add value to pupils’ learning… it’s about them coming up with some good ideas that work to improve lessons.

It’s not good enough to put a tick, can use PowerPoint, tick, can use moviemaker… it’s about how well they can use it… whether they can use it in a powerful and effective way.

It’s actually about creativity and flair in thinking of how best to deploy ICT.

(OECD, 2010: 24)

Box 1.1 What does it mean ‘to be good at ICT’ as a history teacher?

• You’re pretty good ‘technically’; you are relaxed and reasonably adept at working out how to use new applications and fix ‘glitches’/minor or straightforward technical problems.

• You are knowledgeable and up to date in your awareness of the range of ICT applications and programs which can be used to enhance teaching and learning in history.

• You are accomplished in your use of the interactive whiteboard and PowerPoint; your use of these applications usually engages and motivates pupils.

• You are well organised and efficient in terms of using ICT to save time in planning and assessment and to organise your personal ‘archive’ of resources effectively, clear emails, etc.

• You are good at using ICT to build up really good ‘collections’ of powerful impact resources on a wide range of topics. You are familiar with and make use of many of the ‘gems’ that are available on good history websites.

• If you have got access to the internet and a data projector in your teaching sessions, you take full advantage of the wealth of resources on the net to improve the impact of your lessons.

• You are able to deploy these resources to construct well designed and intellectually rigorous pupil tasks using ICT – you can think of good ideas for deploying digital resources and structuring good activities for pupils using ICT resources and applications.

• You are an ‘early adaptor’, quick to pick up on new developments and applications in ICT and work out ideas for doing something useful with them in the history classroom.

• You make good use of ICT (websites, discussion groups, Blogs, Twitter, etc.) to develop your use of ICT in history by being a proactive and diligent part of the ‘community of practice’ of history teachers in the field of ICT.

• When you use ICT in your teaching, it usually works well.

• Your use of ICT improves the quality of your lessons.

• Your pupils use ICT to learn history outside taught sessions.

• Your pupils are good at ‘expressing themselves digitally’.

As I have argued elsewhere, becoming good at ICT is partly about discerning which applications seem likely to have the potential for high ‘pay-off’ in terms of enhancing learning in history, and which are tangential or irrelevant – and then having the intelligence and application to go on to devise or acquire worthwhile things with ICT (Haydn, 2011).

One caveat with respect to technical ‘fluency’ in ICT applications is that it is helpful if teachers are sufficiently confident in their use of a program or application that they can involve pupils in using the technology independently and purposefully. This not only opens up the possibility of pupils learning history outside taught sessions, it also provides the sense of agency and responsibility that Carr (2008) argues is so crucial to pupil engagement in learning. When using Web 2.0 applications, it also provides a means of ‘activating learners as instructional resources for one another’ (Wiliam, 2011: 46), in terms of promoting ‘dialogic’ learning – getting pupils to talk, discuss, argue and develop their thinking with each other.

In terms of a framework for progression in the use of ICT, Table 1.1 suggests the steps towards a situation where the ‘communications’ strand of new technology (the ‘C’ in ICT), enables the development of a ‘community of practice’ where teacher and pupils can work collaboratively on enquiry questions in history outside the confines of classroom time.

Box 1.1 lists some statements that teachers might reflect on in terms of thinking about the extent to which they are exploring the potential of ICT to improve their teaching, and pupils’ learning. I am not suggesting that the list is a comprehensive one, but it might serve as a starting point for teachers or student teachers who are interested in developing their ability to make effective use of ICT.

As you can see, a range of attributes are involved here, some related to technical skills and abilities, some to initiative with resources or organisational skills, and others involving creativity and imagination and ‘networking’ skills. As well as reflecting on how strong you are in these facets of ICT capability, and which would be the most propitious areas for development, given your situation and ‘strengths and weaknesses’, it can also be interesting to think about which of these areas are most influential in terms of improving pupil learning, and where we might develop expertise in ICT and share high-quality ICT resources through collaborative and peer-teaching approaches.

Table 1.1 A model for progression in the use of ICT applications

Level 1	Awareness of the application and of the fact that it might be used in some way to develop pupil learning in history.
Level 2	Ability to use the application to find out or do something ‘useful’.
Level 3	Ability to use the application (to some good learning purpose) in the classroom, with pupils.
Level 4	Ability to get pupils using the application autonomously and usefully so that they can continue to work on enquiry questions outside the classroom and in collaboration with other pupils.

Some myths and misconceptions about ICT (and learning)

One of the causes of disappointment in the extent to which new technology has brought about radical and evenly spread improvements in education is the tendency of those who have not been teachers (and novice teachers) to underestimate the difficulties and complexities involved in learning.¹ In the early stages of their school placements, student teachers sometimes assume that ‘because they have taught it, the pupils have learned it’, and write lesson evaluations that suggest that all the pupils learned everything they were trying to teach. I have heard it said that good teaching is ‘just common sense’. Given that only a very small proportion of what is taught to learners is remembered and understood, it would seem that effective teaching is anything but ‘just common sense’.

If you believe that learning is primarily about the transfer of information, ICT would appear to have a lot to offer, given the increases in the speed and volume of information transfer that it makes possible (see Box 1.2).

As well as the problem that information is not the same as knowledge, there is the problem that not all pupils are trying desperately hard to learn. Fullan argues that even when students do want to learn, teaching something to another person is actually quite difficult: ‘Even when people are sincerely motivated to learn from you, they have a devil of a time doing so. Transferability of ideas is a complex problem of the highest order’ (Fullan, 1999: 63).

Box 1.2 The information transmission theory of learning

It’s not every day you encounter a member of the government who appears to understand the net. Most politicians (Clinton, Blair, Blunkett to name but three) see it as a pipe for pumping things into schools and schoolchildren.

(Naughton, 1998: 19)

There is also the problem that sometimes pupils do not fully understand what we are trying to teach and are confused by our teaching. Lightman and Sadler’s research (1993, 1994) revealed that, after a series of lessons on a topic, fewer pupils grasped the concepts in question than before the lessons. There is also the problem of knowledge retention (Willingham, 2009; Shemilt, 2009): why does so much of the learning ‘slip away’ over time, and what can we do to reduce this slippage? Desforges (2002) argues that knowledge application (in the words of Wineburg, ‘the chasm between knowing X and using X to think about Y’ – Wineburg, 1997: 256), is an even bigger problem, particularly in the UK system. To add to these problems, there is also the issue of not having enough curriculum time to teach all that has to be covered in the National Curriculum or examination specifications. This emerged as a major worry for history teachers in a recent Historical Association survey of the concerns of UK history teachers about current arrangements for the teaching of history in schools (Burn and Harris, 2011).

All these problems or ‘deficits’ between what the teacher is trying to teach, and how much learning results from this teaching, raise the question of how various functions and attributes of ICT might help to solve the problems and reduce the deficits. In what ways does ICT have the potential to improve pupils’ desire to do well in history and get better at it? How might it help teachers to explain things in a more powerful and effective way – and in a way that pupils are more likely to remember and understand? Can it be used to help pupils make connections between the abstruse and abstract concepts that pervade the history curriculum (to be able to understand, for example, that revolutions have some things in common but can take very different forms)? And in what ways might ICT help us to get pupils to continue with their learning beyond the confines of taught classes?

Another misconception that has hampered ways of exploring how new technology might enhance teaching and learning is what Mishra (2012) terms ‘technocentrism’; the tendency to look mainly or exclusively at what the technology can do, in generic and technical terms, rather than what it offers for particular subject disciplines (data logging software, for example, is very useful for science teachers but of no interest to history teachers). There has also, until recently, been a tendency to look at the effect of the technology ‘in isolation’, rather than thinking about how the affordances of the technology interact with teachers’ substantive subject content knowledge and their pedagogical subject knowledge.² For example, a teacher might be an absolute wizard in terms of their ability to do dazzling things with an interactive whiteboard, but if they don’t know much about the causes of the English Civil War (or whatever), or how one might make the topic meaningful and accessible to pupils, it is unlikely to result in a successful lesson.

In other words, it is the teacher’s awareness and understanding of the ways in which various strands of new technology might enable him or her to provide ‘the most powerful analogies, illustrations, examples, explanations and demonstrations’ (Shulman, 1986: 9) that will make their teaching more effective, when used in combination with their expert subject knowledge and sophisticated pedagogical skills. Mishra and Kohler’s idea of ‘Technological Pedagogical Conte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 What does it mean ‘to be good at ICT’ as a history teacher?
• 2 The history utility belt: getting learners to express themselves digitally
• 3 History wikis
• 4 Using discussion forums to support historical learning
• 5 Using blogs and podcasts in the history classroom
• 6 Documentary film making in the history classroom
• 7 We need to talk about PowerPoint
• 8 ‘I am Spartacus’: making the most of the Spartacus website
• 9 Signature pedagogies, assumptions and assassins: ICT and motivation in the history classroom
• 10 Immersive learning in the history classroom: how social media can help meet the expectations of a new generation of learners
• 11 What can you do with an interactive whiteboard?
• 12 Tools for the tech savvy history teacher
• 13 History webquests
• Index