How
can we utilise ICT in order to enhance both teaching and learning in the
History classroom?
Since the 1990’s when I
was in Primary School the use of technology in the classroom has advanced
dramatically. When I started school we
did not have access to any form of Information Communication Technology (ICT)
in our lessons, yet by the time I finished Year 12 I not only had my own laptop
to use at school, but also had access to computer labs, online resources and a
mobile phone in my pocket. In the seven
short years since I completed high school the availability of ICT in schools
has advanced even further. In both of
the two Victorian government schools in which I did my pre-service teaching
placements, students and teachers had access to Interactive Whiteboards, wireless
Internet, Smart-phones and Tablets. ‘Digital technologies available to enhance learning are
rapidly changing’ (ACARA, 2011) and as such are an essential element of
education in Australia. However, just
having access to these new technologies is not enough. In order to enhance student learning, teachers
need to learn how best to utilise ICT in their lessons. This essay aims to analyse and reflect upon
my own experiences and observations as a student teacher about how to make the
most of ICT to enhance student learning in the History classroom.
Although both my
placements were at government schools in Victoria, the way in which ICT was
incorporated into lessons at these two schools was vastly different. Smith (2010) explains that in order to make
the most of ICT in the classroom it needs to be integrated successfully and
used in conjunction with other teaching methods. This is also outlined in the Australian
Curriculum which states that digital technologies
should be ‘embedded... so that they are not
seen as optional tools’ (ACARA, 2011). This was achieved far more successfully at my
second placement school where my mentor teacher, who had just completed
a short course on using ICT as an effective learning tool, had created a
classroom environment in which the use of computers was part of the syllabus
rather than a treat.
In contrast to this, during my first placement, computer labs were
booked for my Year 9 History class every Friday period six. This was a technique used by my first mentor
teacher to try and keep the students engaged during the last lesson before the
weekend. Unfortunately, as the students
were tired and easily distracted, the objective of these lessons became about using
the computers rather than learning the content.
This highlights the need for ICT to be integrated into lessons so that
students do not consider computers as a toy, as well as confirming Smith’s
(2010:89) point that teachers require appropriate training as ‘well-trained,
proficient staff [are] an essential factor in making ICT effective as a
learning tool’.
Although
the internet is an excellent resource for students to ‘access
a growing range of digitised online materials’ (ACARA, 2011), teachers need to
be taught how to use this medium to create effective learning. Admittedly, during my first placement I had
no idea how to use the timetabled computer lessons successfully. As a result, every computer lesson I took
involved an online researching activity, which in effect replaced the text book
with the computer. Although I did as
Zukas (2003) suggests and provided the students with relevant websites in which
to find appropriate and accurate information, now that I have completed the
subject ICT in Secondary Education during
my teacher training, I would approach computer lessons very differently. Both The Australian Curriculum: History
(2011) and the VELS: History Level 6 (2007) stress the importance of students
locating and evaluating sources. As
Haydn (2011) points out, there are now websites known as ‘spoof sites’ which
purposefully provide inaccurate information.
In order to highlight to my students the importance of source evaluation
I would show them these ‘spoof sites’ and discuss the implications of using
material from erroneous sources. In
addition, I would allow students more freedom to find the websites that they
use for their research so that they could develop and build upon the skills of ‘finding and targeting relevant information’
(VELS, 2007).
The ability to
critically analyse sources in order to find relevant information is essential
to the subject of History. According to
Zukas (2003: 114) ‘learning how to vet... sites is an important real-world
skill that students should master as early as possible’. Although in my experience in schools so far I
have found this to be an extremely relevant point, I have also found that once
students have located this information they need to know how to cite it
properly. During my teaching rounds I
found that it was all too easy for students to copy and paste information from
the Internet into a word document and try to pass it off as their own. Even when students had located and evaluated
resources and concluded that they contained relevant information, this did not
always result in students presenting their findings in their own words. While Nettelbeck (2002) argues that slabbing
is a discipline issue that needs to be
dealt with as cheating has been in the past, he also agrees with Zukas (2003:
124) who states that when students are required to ‘draw conclusions, make
comparisons, and engage in higher-order thinking skills’ they are less likely
to copy and paste information from the Internet. In my future teaching career I will take this
into consideration, and try to avoid asking students to use the Internet for
factual recall or to find answers to simple questions.
One way to incorporate
higher order thinking into History lessons is to make use of Bloom’s taxonomy. This taxonomy classifies and ranks objectives
set for students. By achieving the higher
level objectives of this taxonomy, ‘create’, ‘evaluate’ and ‘analyse’, students
are beginning to use critical thinking in order to solve problems (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001). Lankshear, Snyder, & Green (2000:143)
suggest that for students to engage with this higher order thinking, ICT can be
used in the History classroom to create ‘real life’ situations that may be
faced by historians. For example,
original documents could be scanned and viewed online while oral histories can
be recorded and played back via the computer.
This ties in to ACARA’s (2011) definition of the role of digital
technology in the classroom, which is to ‘provide new
and less linear ways of thinking about, interpreting and representing
data’. This would allow students to ‘analyse’
and ‘evaluate’ the kinds of materials accessed by professional historians and ‘create’
their own historical understandings of these different sources. Although during my teaching
rounds I only really incorporated the use of ICT as a research and presentation
tool in the classroom, in the future I would like to develop activities which
involve more of these higher order thinking tasks. For instance, an activity that I may use in
the future is suggested by Smith (2010: 93) who outlines an assignment in which
students are required to ‘contrast different interpretations of an event found
on the Internet’. This not only builds
student awareness about the breadth of information available online, but also introduces
them to the concept of historiography. These
comparisons could also be made between the original scanned documents and the
recorded oral histories as suggested by Lankshear et al. (2000). Historiography is an element of History study
that requires critical analysis and evaluation, which are skills articulated in
the higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy.
As well as higher order
thinking, ICT can be used for engagement.
During my teaching rounds I was able to incorporate the use of video
into my lessons. I found this to be,
especially in the younger year levels, an engaging way for students to gain an
overall understanding of the topic. Haydn
(2011) indicates the usefulness of using videos and short powerful clips, such
as those found on Youtube, in class to make history memorable and to fight
student boredom. During my second
placement I was given a school laptop which had access to both the Internet and
the school Intranet. This allowed me to
plug this computer into the Interactive Whiteboard and show students relevant clips
streamed directly from Youtube. This
learning tool is incredibly diverse. In
the space of two lessons I was able to, with Year 12 students studying the
Vietnam War, watch primary source footage of the anti-war demonstrations in
Melbourne’s Swanston Street in the 1970’s, then ten minutes later show my Year
8’s a re-enactment of Socrates’ death in Ancient Athens. I found that these videos were highly
successful in engaging student interest in the various topics we were
covering. However, had I had more time I
would have liked to further develop the use of video in my Year 8 class. Smith (2010) suggests an activity that
involves students creating their own video using images that they have found
online as well as either spoken or written narration to tell a story of an
historical event. This is definitely an
activity I will think about incorporating into my future teaching.
During my second
placement I was lucky enough to have access to Interactive Whiteboards in every
classroom in which I taught. Although
both Smith (2010) and Zukas (2003) contend that inequality of opportunity
with ICT equipment is a common occurrence due to the cost of these
technologies, I found that both my placement schools had reasonable access to
computers with the Internet, televisions and Interactive Whiteboards. However, at both schools, the Interactive
Whiteboards were more readily available to students in the upper year levels. Smith (2010) points out that Interactive
Whiteboards are a useful tool when viewing images. Yet in my classroom I did not simply use this
technology as a television. While my
Year 11’s were studying the History of the Warsaw Ghetto in World War Two, I
uploaded an interactive website in which students had to locate countries on a
map of Europe
onto the Interactive Whiteboard so that students could stand in front of the
class and compete with each other to find out who knew the location of all the
countries in Europe. This activity then
lead on to the discussion of one of the key knowledge criteria required in the
VCE Study Design for Area of Study Two; ‘factors
influencing changes in social life especially... warfare and invasion [and]
technological developments in transport such as the car and aeroplane’ (VCAA,
2004). The use of the Interactive
Whiteboard with this Year 11 class also allowed students to ‘use presentation tools such as slide shows to enhance oral presentations’
(VELS, 2007).
In theory ICT provides
students and teachers with opportunities to visualise thinking, create work and
communicate with each other and the world (VELS, 2007). However, as shown in the above essay, there
is always room for improvement. In the
reality of a classroom technology can fail, students can become disengaged with
content, distracted by the equipment and plagiarise easily, and teachers can
struggle to maintain an up to date knowledge of all the possibilities ICT makes
available to them. Yet in contrast to my
own experience, the majority of students that I will teach will have grown up
with access to ICT in their classrooms from as early as kindergarten. These students will have the benefit of being
diverse learners with the ability to access information and operate technology
in a way that I cannot even comprehend. According
to the viral Youtube video “Did You Know” (Fisch, 2007) ‘we are currently
preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist, using technologies that
haven’t been invented in order to solve problems we don’t even know are
problems yet.’ It is for this reason
that, despite technical difficulties, History teachers need to be trained to
effectively incorporate ICT into their classrooms so that instead of being
given the answer, students are taught the skills required to find and evaluate
information that they come across themselves.
References:
ACARA (2011) History: General Capabilities Retrieved
29th September 2011 from
http://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/History/General-capabilities.
Anderson, L.W. & Krathwohl, D.R. (Eds.) (2001). A taxonomy for
learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of
educational objectives. New York: Addison Wesley Longman.
Haydn, T. (2011) Using ICT in the Teaching of History
Retrieved 29th September 2011 from
http://www.history.org.uk/resources/secondary_resource_4121,4122_126.html.
Fisch, K. (2007) Did You Know Retrieved 11th
November 2011 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljbI-363A2Q.
Lankshear, C., Snyder, I. & Green, B. (2000) Teachers and Techno-literacy: Managing literacy, technology and
learning in schools. NSW: Allen & Unwin.
Nettelbeck, D. (2002)
‘Computers and Learning: Does ICT really change the way secondary English
students learn?’ English in Australia,
Vol 134, p. 78 – 85.
Smith, N. (2010) The History Teacher’s Handbook London:
Continuum International Publishing Group.
VELS (2007) The Humanities – History: Standards and
Learning Focus Retrieved 29th September 2011 from http://vels.vcaa.vic.edu.au/vels/history.html
VCAA (2004) History: Victorian Certificate of Education
Study Design, VIC: Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority.
Zukas, A. (2003)
‘Active Learning, World History, and the Internet: Creating Knowledge in the
Classroom’ in Cantu, D. A. and Warren, W. J. (eds.) Teaching History in the Digital Classroom Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe
Inc.
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