Tag: History

BBC Dimensions: exploring the human scale of events and places in history

Data, Mapping, Maths, Social MediaPublished on5 Comments on BBC Dimensions: exploring the human scale of events and places in history

Dimensions is an experimental project from the BBC that allows you to compare the scale of different types of events with something that we can all recognise. There are two parts of the project “How many really?” and “How big really?“

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“How many really?” is all about the numbers of people that were involved in a whole range of different events throughout history. The tool allows you to either add in your own numbers, for example 30, the number of children in your class, connect with Facebook or Twitter and compare your networks or even the number of people who can board a double decker bus or a Boeing 747.

You are then shown a visual comparison with the number of people involved in the event that you have chosen. The events fall into the following categories:

  • Battles
  • Civilisations
  • Current Affairs
  • Disasters
  • Diseases
  • Entertainment
  • Modern Society
  • Religion
  • Slavery
  • War

“How big really?” is all about getting a better understanding for the scale of different historical events and locations compared to our own map location.

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We want to bring home the human scale of events and places in history. The D-Day landing beaches measured from London to Norfolk in the UK. How far would the Titanic stretch down your street?

Dimensions simply juxtaposes the size of historical events with your home and neighbourhood, overlaying important places, events and things on a satellite view of where you live. Certain “Dimensions” can be transformed into short walks, so you can get a physical appreciation of the distances involved.

The tool provides a range of example categories to explore including:

  • The War on Terror
  • Space
  • Depths
  • Ancient Worlds
  • Environmental Disasters
  • Festivals and Spectacles
  • WW2 – Battle of Britain
  • The Industrial Age
  • Cities in History

From the Ancient Worlds category you can place all sorts of significant monuments, like the Colosseum, on top of your own location. It gives you a true understanding of the scale of these structures. This would be great for classes to begin to really appreciate these huge monuments. What would be even better would be seeing a 3D model – as in Google Earth or Maps – on your location and then being able to pan and zoom around it.

The Dimensions tools would be interesting to use within a history class but also within maths to help children and classes get a better appreciation of different sizes. It will eventually be integrated into the online history resources at the BBC depending on user feedback.

A History of Teaching and Learning from 500 Billion Words

Data, GooglePublished onUpdated on2 Comments on A History of Teaching and Learning from 500 Billion Words

 

learning v teaching

 

By analysing over 500 billion words the Google Books Ngram Viewer allows you to compare the history of terminology and language from approximately 5 million digitised books.

The graph above shows my search for the terms “teaching” and “learning” in publications between the years 1500 and 2010.

What fascinates me is how the popularity or usage of the different terms climbed and fell throughout this period. The term “Teaching” has been used more frequently since the turn of the 18th century, somewhat settling into a plateau in the last 60 years. In comparison the term “learning” seems to have more of a rollercoaster frequency in the last 500 years.

References to “learning” from 1800 fell notably in the following 100 years, to a point where “teaching” was referenced more. And then began a 75 year period where “teaching” was clearly more frequently used or referred to in published literature. Why would there have been such a decline or change in frequencies?

If you look at the references to “learning’ there seems to be some peak and trough pattern amidst an upward trend. I wonder why this was the case? Similarly why did references to “learning” fall away at the turn of the 19th century only to climb steadily again in the last 100 years? What perceptions of “learning” or cultural differences were there between the 1700s (“learning” references increase) and the 1800s (“learning” references decrease.)?

I am no historian and I am sure many of you reading this will be able to explain the information better than me – needless to say it would be interesting to explore any broad reasons or background that might effect such results.

Using the "Discuss" tool in Google spreadsheets

Google DocsPublished onUpdated on8 Comments on Using the "Discuss" tool in Google spreadsheets

We have been using spreadsheets from Google quite considerably this year. The main strength over Excel is the ability to share the data that is generated and benefit from a pooling of efforts and results. One of the most recent uses in my Year 5/Grade 4 class was during a History lesson, in which we were exploring why the River Nile is so important to Egypt. I posed the question quite openly and asked the children to explore some climate data about different world cities in order to refer it against some of the major sities in Egypt. I have embedded the spreadsheet below.

Each child was given a few different cities to explore and using our class laptop resource they independently investigated average rainfall, temperature etc. They added the results into the correct sheet and as we all worked we were able to see the other results popping up.

At the end of the session I posed the main enquiry once again, “Why was/is the River Nile so important to Egypt?” I asked the children to use the “Discuss” tab (top right, next to “Share” and “Publish”) and to write their answers in the instant messaging tool. Once they had added their response I asked them to join me in front of the SMARTBoard to finish the session.

The “Discuss” tool allowed me to quickly collate all of the children’s thoughts into one place and display them on the IWB to discuss. It proved to be a good focused activity to finish the independent session and it generated some interesting points to discuss in the plenary. Here is the unedited transcript of what they responded with.

year5tb: because it dosen’t rain much.

me: the river nile

year5tb: so they can drink beacuse they can drink and stay healthy. So they can drink from in it. ? Hi J.C!

Because they don’t realy have much precipitation to live on.

They hardly have any precipitatoin and the River Nile is the only water they have

year5tb: because theres no fresh water to help there land stay moist. Becues it is the most hotist and driay and that is the only warter. Because it’s the only river in eygit. That the only river. We think that the river Nile is important because the weather is so dry and hot. It is the only wet river they have.

Why is the river niel inportent becuase the river is dray and it is not so wet. So they can keep fresh.

me: Because they hardly have eny rain fall

year5tb: Because its hot and dose’nt rain much.

So egypt can have water from the river and then take it back to there village.

As you can see in the text there is plenty to discuss with the children and we referred back to the spreadsheet as we talked and justified some of the ideas. It brought all of their thoughts into one place and became a clear focal point for closing the lesson. I think that the idea of a simple message board service / tool would be really useful for a laptop session whether in GDocs or not – perhaps something to explore, it would have to be something light, with no login so children can just get in and add their response.

(If I were to ask the children do something similar in the future I will ask them to add an initial to the post so that it becomes more useful for assessment purposes.)