Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

classroom use

Context

I used this site as a research tool with 2 groups of up to 28 year 8 students. I wanted them to understand that in the current society we live, fame is a very transient idea, and that in history, we have the opportunity to look at the criteria by which people become famous from a different point of view.

Students were first asked to consider what made a person famous, and then to research the site by looking at a variety of criteria and seeking answers to several questions, eg a famous person who shared their first name, their surname, their birth day, or died on the day they were born, who lived in the same area as they did etc. This gave them the skills to use the excellent search facilities of the website.

Labour saving aspects

To access the site, I produced a �Word� document that detailed the site address, the username and password. Students simply had to follow the link to get to the log in area of the site, and then follow the instructions.

Learning outcomes

Since the site is primarily intended for research, then the learning outcomes can only be assessed by the quality of the work produced and the ability shown by the students to research and learn more about their own chosen research topic. The site does not intend to be used for logging pupil progress or providing feedback on performance. The material will provide students to involve themselves in a wide range of activities however, the limits of which are the imagination of the teacher responsible for setting the tasks based on the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: for example satisfying Citizenship requirements for giving an opinion on a subject using words or speech, taking part in discussions and debates or considering and explaining the views of others.

Student Response

The majority of the students were engaged by the site, and found the whole experience enjoyable. They were pleased to find out things about themselves that they would not have found out otherwise, and some remarked on the use of the site for genealogical purpose. Some said in subsequent feedback that they would find it useful to have for homework access, but others claimed they could find the same sort of detail elsewhere, failing to appreciate the filter effect that the site provided them with, removing the thousands of dangerous and questionable responses they might have got from a normal search engine set of results.

Special Needs

I think the site was not designed with the educational needs of the less able in mind, though it is possible to do simple searches and then make them more complex, thereby providing opportunities for support as well as challenge.

IWB Suitability

Because of the importance of giving students the necessary information to log into the site, I was able to show them this process on a white board as a plenary session, and then illustrate the various ways that a search through the database could be conducted. The use of a white board was of considerable importance here to the whole class, as to explain it individually would have proved an impossible or very time consuming task.