Explore Victoria’s history with Vic Heritage

Today’s guest post comes from Tanya Wolkenberg, Heritage Communications Project Officer for the Heritage Council of Victoria. Tanya introduces Vic Heritage, an iPhone app that lets you explore significant sites across Victoria. 

Vic Heritage is an app designed to connect people to the history of the places around them. For years now I’ve been watching the development of mobile technologies with keen interest, thinking of how these technologies can connect people to the stories and layers of history in their streets and suburbs.

There are lots of apps out there doing this really well, Historypin probably first among them. As I work for the Heritage Council of Victoria and we have an amazing database of 2,200 places and objects of state significance to Victoria, that’s where my focus lies. Each place or object on the register has a Statement of Significance – a statement of why that place is so important it should be protected – and these reasons might range from architectural to scientific, to contributing to an understanding of Victoria’s cultural history.

I was also really interested in capturing people’s stories about those places. If we think of the Statement of Significance as the official history of the place, I wanted to know the unofficial history too. Maybe someone saw their first gig there, or their parents got married there…. I wanted the app to reflect the layers of personal and community meaning attached to places.

In order to do that, I worked with our developers, Outware Mobile, to create some custom functionality. This allows users to add their own content to individual places, either a comment or image. Once the content is moderated it is displayed on a tab attached to the place.

We also created some custom tour functionality, which allows users to create their own tours by adding places together and giving them a title (might be related to a theme or location). Users can theme places together by a type of place, style or personal interest (for example, silos, Art Deco or swimming pools) or by location. They can save the tours for themselves or chose to share the tours with others.

The tours functionality is particularly useful for excursions – students can individually or in small groups create their own tours of the city according to buildings on a particular route, by architectural style or era, or by a type of place (civic building, church, etc). They can share these tours with the rest of the class, or report back on the histories of some of the places they’ve seen along the way, having read the Statements of Significance. I’d be keen to get feedback from other teachers using it as part of their classroom or excursion activities.

There are also ‘Recommended tours’ – tours created by us. These include two audio tours – one of the housing styles and social history of St Kilda narrated by Radio National’s Peter Mares, and another on contemporary architects’ re-use of old industrial buildings in the city. The two other tours in this section include one on 20th century architecture, and another which explores, via the built heritage of the city, Victoria’s Framework of Historical Themes. Each of these are easily walkable and lend themselves to excursions.

The app is currently only available for iOS devices, but we plan to rebuild the Victorian Heritage Database with most of the app’s functionality in the near future, and a mobile version of this will be available to all smartphone users.

The Vic Heritage app can be downloaded from the Apple Appstore.

Thanks to Tanya for taking us through some of the features of the Vic Heritage app. Tanya has also recorded a brief video demonstration of the app’s key features.

Sovereign Hill Education Resources

Our guest post today comes from Sovereign Hill Education Officer Stephanie Rosestone. The Sovereign Hill team have some great free professional development opportunities and resources for teaching history.

This year Sovereign Hill Education is running free webinars offering professional learning opportunities for teachers. In Term 2 there will be two webinars: How to find good resources for teaching history (Thursday 3 May) and Innovative history teaching in practise (Mon 14 May). For more information and to register visit here.
 
If you’re going to be teaching Australian History, Sovereign Hill Education has a number of free online resources to support your programs. Our Education Website is a great place to start. Here you will find a Teachers section that includes Bibliographies of Resources, Teaching Kits, VELS units and upcoming PDs (including a one day conference AusVELS History in the Primary Classroom in July). There is also a section called Talking about Learning that includes videos of teachers and students talking about their experiences of teaching and learning history. The Students section of our website includes images, research notes and audio files retelling excerpts of primary source documents.
 
We look forward to being part of your Professional Learning Network. You can find us on Twitter @GoldfieldsEd or you can follow our blog where we will be sharing resources, news and ideas.
 

 

ABC: 80 days that changed our lives

 

The ABC has recently launched a fantastic new site, 80 days that changed our lives. The site explores 80 key events in history that shaped our world. As you would expect from the ABC, there are a wealth of video and audio resources related to each event, along with personal reflections from ABC staff.

The events are organised by theme but perhaps the more interesting way of browsing is via the timeline. You can also make comments about each event on the forum located at the bottom of each page.

The site is a great introduction to some of the key events that have shaped our society and is an great way to browse the wealth of resources available in the ABC archive.

My Place in History

Recently I was introduced to this new program for Australian Primary Schools.

Screen shot 2010-11-10 at 4.20.25 PM

My Place in History, a new educational programme for Australian upper primary schools, is a web-based programme designed to teach students about the concepts of change and diversity – of backgrounds, in family structures, and the many economic, political and social circumstances in both our distant and more recent history that have contributed to who we are today and how we all came to be living in Australia.

Family history experts, Ancestry.com, created this resource to encourage understanding of family and social history from an early age by utilising the very latest in online technology and historical information. My Place in History has been designed for teachers by teachers and is tailored to each state’s individual curriculum.  A collection of specially designed online resources and activities have been developed to make learning about history and their family’s role within this both educational and engaging.

My Place in History

Students will explore their own personal family history, creating family trees online, whilst learning about the key drivers of change within society during the lives of their ancestors – wherever they came from – and how these changes impacted their own identity, as well as that of their family and society more generally.

Over the course of the programme students will look back over two generations of their own family and how society changed during the lives of their older family members and ancestors.

Unit 1: Change through History

Students will learn about significant changes that have occurred over time in transport, communication, manufacturing, housing, leisure, food, technology, purchasing, and medicine.

Unit 2: My Society through History

Students will develop an understanding of history as it applies to their community. The initial focus is on the school; the subsequent focus is on a section of a nearby community.

Unit 3: My Family History

Students will research and understand a minimum of two generations of their own family through the use of oral history and interactive resources.

The website also provides fun, educational games for students and an opportunity for teachers to privately upload and store their own digital resources free of charge.

My Place in History looks like a great resource for the ubiquitous family tree project.

Feature blog – Glenys Lowden’s year 7 History blog

Lowther Hall AGS’s Head of Library Glenys Lowden has kindly agreed to share information on the development of her year 7 History blog.

Screen shot 2010-07-08 at 11.54.36 AM

Glenys explains why there was a need for such a resource:

I have set up a Year 7 History blog for my class this year.  The main aim is to disseminate information to them through this source, have discussion when appropriate for tasks and include media content.

Screen shot 2010-07-08 at 11.55.41 AM

It is great to see that Glenys is reinforcing students set tasks through the blog along with a range of resources. Looking at the number of comments from students, using the blog seems to be a popular way to learn. Another excellent resource from Glenys.

Historical Facebook

Recently edtech guru Richard Byrne wrote about a way to encourage students to research using the concept of Facebook. By creating a faux Facebook account for a person of interest, students need to research that person and try to bring their personality to life. Derrick Waddell has developed a template that any teacher can freely use.

Screen shot 2010-08-12 at 8.38.52 AM

To read the entire post, click here.

Note: Students will NOT set up a Facebook account, this is merely a template based on the Facebook concept and layout.

The State Library of Victoria Education Services have also alerted me to an interactive way for teachers to bring Shakespeare to life for their students. Sarah Schmelling created this Facebook page for Hamlet:

Screen shot 2010-08-12 at 9.39.18 AM

Again, Facebook does not have to be used for this unit, but using the template above, students could create new Shakespearean scenes, scenarios, characters or plays, update the play they are studying or develop conversations between characters.

A great way to bring history to life for our students using a format they are familiar with.

WikiNorthia

Documenting stories from people in Melbourne’s north, WikiNorthia is a wiki with two main assets.

  1. It is open to contributions from anyone.
  2. With topics such as:

  • art and literature,
  • buildings,
  • community,
  • environment,
  • events,
  • people,
  • places,
  • sport and recreation,
  • transport and
  • work and commerce,

there is a vast array of resources available for research.

WikiNorthia

The about page explains the origins of the wiki:

WikiNorthia is an innovative project that will encourage people across five local councils with rich cultural histories and diverse communities to get together and tell their stories providing a snapshot of life in the north of Melbourne now as well as the past. The project is the first of its type in Victoria and in fact Australia.

Students in the regions catered for by WikiNorthia could find an audience for specific pieces of work as well as using the wiki as a research resource. Support materials will be useful for teachers and students.

Museum Box

This is a nifty site that is available to teachers and schools worldwide. The site explains how Museum Box

provides the tools for you to build up an argument or description of an event, person or historical period by placing items in a virtual box. What items, for example, would you put in a box to describe your life; the life of a Victorian Servant or Roman soldier; or to show that slavery was wrong and unnecessary? You can display anything from a text file to a movie. You can also view and comment on the museum boxes submitted by others.

Museum box

The site also explains how

You can add text, images, video and sound to the side of the cubes. To save your box you will need to register. For teachers there is lesson guidance and instructions for use are available in the Teachers Area and you can Register your school.

Anyone can view the Museum Boxes, but if you wish to make and save your own box, it does require registration, which is approved (in my case) in about five days.

What an engaging way of putting together resources on a historical (or any) topic.

Thanks to Richard Byrne from Free Technology for Teachers for alerting Bright Ideas to Museum Box!

New and improved site from State Library of Victoria

The State Library of Victoria has just relaunched its website. With an amazing wealth of information, activities and events, checking out the new SLV website is a must.
Homepage

Homepage

Hamish Curry, Education & Onsite Learning Manager in the Learning Services area of the State Library of Victoria explains:
This revamped site opens up a great deal of new opportunities to bring our collections and services to the surface; be sure to check out the ‘Learn’, ‘Explore’ and ‘What’s On’ sections.
Professional learning
Online learning resources
Online learning resources such as:
are included.
Professional learning
Professional learning
The professional learning page (above) caters for:
slv 4

Student and teacher resources

The Student and teacher resources page (above) provides resources related to:

  • Specific websites for schools (such as ergo, Insideadog)
  • SLV blogs
  • Audio and video resources
  • Education kits

So many fantastic resources available in the one place, the newly revamped SLV website is an absolute treasure.

Fotobabble

Recently, The Nerdy Teacher Nick Provenzano posted an article on Fotobabble on his excellent blog.

Further uses include narrated postcards for Geography, commenting on photos for History, quick book reviews, commenting on art works – the uses are endless!

Fotobabbles can be embedded into blogs, wikis and other websites and shortly there will be the option of creating slideshows.

Students can use their own photos or those from copyright free or Creative Commons websites and then record a narration. Fotobabbles may be kept private, just remember to ensure the privacy box is ticked and click ‘save’. As with most social media sites, there is a way of reporting objectionable content, but there is no way of ensuring students don’t find any, unless you investigate first and supervise use.

Using Fotobabble in class could be a good introduction to Creative Commons and the moral and legal use of images.