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.

I did however feel sad as while people are entitled to their opinion as to if Climate Change is happening I hope this doesn’t distract us from the fact that the world is in a pretty messy state and any message that forces us to tidy up a bit has merit.

While I have made up Jeopardy games before in Powerpoint and lately in Smart’s Notebook this is so easy and looks so good. There is also a lot of information on the site in the way of help files for everything from creating custom skins to adding music files. I found that my Year 11 class took about 45 minutes on the American Government Review game and now look forward to seeing what their recall is like come moodle test time.

Why Timelines?

Bee Docs Timeline is software for Mac OS X that makes it easy for you to present historical events in a way that reveals connections and clarifies relationships.

Make timeline charts of world history, family trees, fictional events or business deadlines. Timelines can help you understand and present history with new perspective!

The application allows you to very put together images and hyperlinks that look fantastic. The next step is getting my students who find it a real drag drawing timelines to create their own as we reach the end of our Civil Rights topic.

I have put a pdf version of the timeline on our moodle page at KKC The entries are clickable hyperlinks to the wikipedia articles as well which is a neat option. The next step is a downloadable version for ipods (fast becoming the most prevalent web browser at our college, those and psp’s)

But here it is as a youtube with some of my favorite Pearl Jam thrown in for good measure.