Sign up for a Newsletter!

The Ancient History Encyclopedia is a webpage created to develop some historical content for students, teachers and history enthusiasts, and these characteristics fits like hand in glove to me.

I signed up for the newsletter of this page because it have some good content and keys to learn about the Ancient History and also have a section called "Et Cetera" where you can find a lot of interviews, articles, photos or education related to history that is very useful if you want to include new researches to your classroom, or to show to your students that the History is not all written, it is continuing discovering new things.

With signing up for the newsletter, you have the oportunity to know all the new articles, discounts for buying books or post your photos related to ancient history, so I strongly recommend it. Also, you can follow the page at Google + so you are more than informed!!

Here's the webpage if you're interested: http://www.ancient.eu/

And if you want to sign up for the newsletter:   http://ancient.us8.list-manage.com/subscribe/post?u=c3168e59d8bfba7986977db46&id=ac74a77c22

Comment about apps

After seeking some apps and tools in the Internet for our class, I want to share with you my favourite ones.

Firstly, the best tool for computers or tablets is “History Pin”. This is an excellent tool for using at the classroom. History Pin is a webpage where you can search for a specific city or town and see immediately the most important historical facts of your search. Well, my field of expertise is History, and one of the most important objectives of the course is that students learn to preserve the historical heritage, that’s the reason why history pin is so useful, you can adapt the search to the period you’re studying and also, you can learn about the big cities of the world, or your own town and maybe write some new posts to this webpage to increase the knowledge of the historical heritage of your own town.

My second selection is a lesson plan for a whiteboard, and this is History and Geography: Making a New Nation. This lesson explains the colonisation of North America by the English people; this could be very useful because you can use it in different areas (History class and Geography class). It explains the organisation of the new colonies of North America and also the historical facts, with images, explanations, and activities for the whiteboard as creating a timeline.

My third selection is a plan for print, and it’s about The Structures of Nineteenth-Century Government. This is an important tool for the teacher because it gives you the structure of the lesson, the information and suggestions. Besides, you can print the lesson and there are links that guides you to the additional information to give to your students. It is very useful for planning a lesson because it includes the objectives and some activities you could do at the classroom.

Last but not least, the choice for an eBook or publication. I would choose the “Decisive Battles of the World”, maybe it is heavy-going for the students but in my point of view, this eBook could be very useful for an activity. For example, if we are studying the Napoleonic Empire, we can focus on the “Waterloo battle” and use this information for doing some exercises to contextualize what we are studying. The importance of this book is that it has all the important battles of the history, so we can adapt one fact for each period and increase the reading habit to the students but without saturating the student.

Browse the Internet and use LINO!

Hello everybody!

Here's my canvas. I used LINO to create this canvas where I can post all my researches about history lessons.

I hope you like it!

http://linoit.com/users/tfipal/canvases/Task%201.%20Thais%20Fitor

CMS Examples

Recently, all types of educational centers have a web page, and they use different systems as joomla!, drupal, wordpress, moodle, mestre a casa...

All have more or less the same appearance because all the pages needs to inform to parents and students about the news of the center, but they need to be attractive and clear at the same time. This is one of the reasons why drupal could be my preference to create my own CMS. In my opinion a CMS must be specific with the content they have, easy to find things, where the news appear at first but with the option of searching old ones. 

It is true that every site have different features and maybe the examples we saw did not demonstrate the real potential of the software, but basing myself with the research of CMS examples of high schools, I definitely choose Drupal.

Joomla!

When you are a teacher who wants to use ICT in their classroom and outside with their students maybe is time to know what is Joomla! and why this is important to you.

Joomla! is a content management system, in other words, is a software where you can build your own web page with your personal content as documents, photos, videos, text, etc. and the most important thing, it's free!

I never used Joomla! before but in the research about what is this site and how it works, we can see that the site offers different features to help us to create your own web page, as multilingual options (if you are working in Spanish, or English), easy upgrades, nested categorization (very useful if we are using the web page as a class tool, where you can keep different units, exercices...) and more.

Joomla have extensions too, and if I have to choose one, maybe my choice is the Structure and Navigation because if we, as teachers, are creating a web page where our students could navigate, study, find new information o make their homework it is necessary that they find everything easily with a clear structure. 

If you are interested in download Joomla, or knowing more about it, please check this website:

https://www.joomla.org/about-joomla.html

What is the Cloud? - Advantages and disadvantages

We can define the term CLOUD as the services where information and files are kept on servers connected to the Internet.

Using the Cloud has many advantages, it is a service created for storage information and files, where you do not need to keep it closer to you anymore. On the one hand the most important advantage is that you can choose the scale and cost of your cloud (referring to storage), depending of your needs because many companies gives you free storage (with a limit) and you can amplify your storage by paying for it. In fact, you can have your files in any digital device you work with: computer, smartphone or tablet.

On the whole, many people nowadays use digital copies for everything, photos, books, music, video, etc., so it is normal that young generations’ uses these services to keep their files safe and to manage them in every device they use.

On the other hand there are disadvantages too, not everything in the cloud is good. For instance, the security might be a problem if someone stole your password and your files. There is a lack of control of where your files are, the “cloud” is a vague term to call “somewhere on the Internet”, and these could affect to your reliability. Also, there are not offices with Customer Support to ask about the problems that you could have. These services have a strict policy that could help you or not depending on the country where you live.

In any way is a useful tool to keep and share information with another people, and I normally use some of them, for example:

•  Dropbox, where I share with my friends our photos and useful documents for our studies.

• OneDrive or SkyDrive at my home with the computer, tablet and smartphone to have all my music, e-books and photos in all the devices I have.

• Google Drive for group work, and to keep personalized maps of the cities that I am going to visit.

If you want to know more about the Cloud, or Cloud Computing you could take a look to this websites where I found information:

Articles: 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/webwise/guides/what-is-cloud-computing

http://www.infoworld.com/article/2683784/cloud-computing/what-cloud-computing-really-means.html

Video:

Interaction in class

Work through interaction could motivate students and teachers. Following the examples above, we are going to context our class at 4th of ESO, in a History lesson. 

We are trying to stimulate our students, so we would like to use an interactual methodology, where the classroom could learn because of their work at the class, where the good students could help the others. How could we do this interaction classes?

• Group tasks. Maybe this is the easiest way to start an interaction between students; they could help each other, then explain their work, and evaluate themselves.
•  Debate. History could help students to be critic; they can share their reflections and ask why something happened. Debate could afford them to be more open and make easier to understand history for some students. In this area maybe role plays could be an option, where the students could participate as members of the history, make them act as a politician or a burgess.
• Blog. Not all students learn the same way, or are equal. Many students are shy, well; the blog is a tool where they can share doubts, news about the period we are studying and also a way to interact outside the classroom.
• Brainstorm. Starting a new unit could be easy if you start asking to the students what they think they are going to study next, and the brainstorm could help to separate myths of history.
•  Games. The classroom could be fun too, trivia games of the unit that you are teaching could make them more interactive.

On the one hand, the principal advantage in this list is the promotion of the interaction in class, the students can learn not only as receivers also as teachers, classmates, etc. They could be more independent of the teacher explanations and be more active searching information for the class.

On the other hand, there are disadvantages too. The biggest one could be the schedule, because this activities need time and the curriculum and the time of the classes are subject. Maybe these list could like to students but all depends in the type of class, if they are participative, if they have a good relation between them... Maybe group tasks could be stressful for people who does not like to share time with ther classmates for different reasons, we have to think for who are you teaching/working and adapt to them.