Teaching History Submission: Why history teachers need to stop being scared and embrace the power of social

networking
Social networking has caused a revolution online in the last decade with huge numbers of people using this new technology. Facebook (over 640 million users) and Twitter (over 175 million users) being the two biggest names to date. This has drastically changed the way we interact with people and run our lives. However, education has been scared to embrace this technology and has been quick to block and lock it in schools. Now, however, we need to start the fight back and use the power of this technology to our advantage. This year my school, Redland Green in Bristol, has begun to use Twitter and it has had a very positive impact on our teaching and learning. The article will summarise the lessons we have learnt and the reasons why every History department should set up a Twitter account. Indication of the type of article: The article will focus on the positive outcomes of using Twitter. It is a personal account of the experience we have had at using social networking with our students. Over the year we have found that Twitter has had several positive impacts. The article will illustrate and explain each of the following: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Sharing Home Learning Reporting home from Field Trips Sharing revision tips Enriching our Schemes of Work - Linking to sites / videos etc Engaging with experts - Retweeting others tweets Creating in class discussions Sharing resources

Additionally the article will need to have a section outlining the basics of using twitter. I envisage this might look similar to the guidance I recently put together for a local History Network Meeting: http://goo.gl/Wm2fj How will this move forward the professional knowledge of the community of history teachers? Social networking is a key development of Web 2.0 and due to its recent development there has not been a vast amount of articles about using Web 2.0 to help history teaching. Therefore this article would not directly build upon other articles as it is a pioneering technique. However, as a body of articles about using ICT in the history classroom it would build upon the following articles: Computers don't bite! Your first tentative steps in using ICT in the classroom. (Publication date: 1st November 2000 by Alf Wilkinson)

What's your claim: Developing pupils' historical argument skills using asynchronous text based computer conferencing (Publication date: 1st March 2007 by David Martin, Caroline Coffin & Sarah North) When computers don't give you a headache: the most able lead a debate on medicine through time (Publication date: 1st September 2006 by Dan Moorhouse) Additionally in terms of developing field trips the article would also build upon the articles in Teaching History 126: Outside the Classroom What figures will be included in the article? The article will be illustrated by examples of our tweets and screen captures of other peoples tweets that we have used in class. Additionally I would hope to include an example of one of our Twitter class discussions. These would be colourful and vibrant and exactly the sort of thing shown in Teaching History. If copyright issues arise over screen captures of Twitter we can just reproduce the words in a format similar but not copied from Twitter. Below are some examples of the illustrations that could be used:

What is the evidence base for this article? The article will be based chiefly upon my own experience and the experience of my colleagues of using Twitter. I will support these claims with student voice excerpts and by the results of an online survey we ran earlier in the year of students and parents. Over 40 students were questioned (from Year 9 to Year 13) and about 15 parents. Additionally there

are other teachers online who are doing similar things with Twitter and if this article is approved I will contact them for their feedback as well.

Katharine Burn Arthur Chapman Christine Counsell Michael Fordham

k.burn@ioe.ac.uk; chapman_arthur@hotmail.com; cc247@cam.ac.uk; maf44@cam.ac.uk.