What was the better lesson?

So yesterday I spent time preparing a lesson for my year 11 History class. The reasons being two-fold one, I had an observation lesson for my appraisal and I always like to show some technology off and two, It’s nearly the end of the term and I need to get this Origins of World War Two topic finished before the break.

So I headed off to the TES site and found a task on appeasement, similar to one I had used before but nicely presented. I then had the laptops booked for the period and after my initial discussion, a quick video clip of Chamberlain arriving with the document he claimed achieved peace for our time got the class started on the task which I had set up in Moodle. Now this task went reasonably well but at the end of the period when I checked what the class had learned I was disappointed with how little was achieved.

So the next day I taught traditionally I would say. We read and answered questions, drew some maps of the period 1938-1939 and discussed why people wouldn’t like to go to war after the pain of the years prior to 1938. At the end of the period during recap a number of the students remarked how they got that and how they like those lessons.

At this point I am confused. I guess when you are trying to move quickly through teaching content and facts it is hard to beat traditional teaching for the shear volume of stuff and it is by doing this that my students have gained scholarships in the past. I am however looking to vary this more and more. Aside from using ICT for making tasks ‘pretty’ I have, at the urging of @efreeman been getting one student a day to write a reflective piece on moodle which we can then work on to post as part of a class blog so we begin.

I must say it makes it hard for me to evangelise ICT use to fellow staff members when my class get better results from ICT poor lessons. I will keep trying to get the results that prove there is a better way.