Meet the Other Phone. A phone that grows with your child.

Meet the Other Phone.
A phone that grows with your child.

Buy now

Please or to access all these features

AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

New History Online Educational Resource

13 replies

ECSpicer · 18/02/2021 12:28

I am a trainee secondary history teacher, and for the past year, I have been working on a blog that works as an online educational resource for history, archaeology, and heritage. The link is below.
As the main aim of my blog is to try and get parents, children, and schools alike interested in what I have done already, I thought it might be a good idea to test the water a little bit, and see what the parents of Mumsnet think.
I am after ways in which I can improve, as well as ideas for future content. I have ideas/plans to move into podcast creation, as well as creating a YouTube channel, but I want to walk before I can run.
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Kind regards
Emily
archaeologicalhistorian.squarespace.com/

OP posts:
ECSpicer · 18/02/2021 12:29

The link may not have worked, so I have put the link below as well.

archaeologicalhistorian.squarespace.com/

OP posts:
Cornishmumofone · 18/02/2021 13:00

I'd recommend looking at a theme that works better on mobile devices. I would also suggest that you consider accessibility and aiming to meet WCAG 2.1. The alt text shouldn't just be a copy of the caption, it needs to be a meaningful description of the image. At the moment the website is not keyboard navigable.

Playnoh · 18/02/2021 13:16

It’s just a blog about you at historical sites? I wouldn’t recommend this to my students. If you want it to be a learning resource, concentrate on history skill, not just basic content.

ECSpicer · 18/02/2021 13:26

@Playnoh

It’s just a blog about you at historical sites? I wouldn’t recommend this to my students. If you want it to be a learning resource, concentrate on history skill, not just basic content.
Thank you for your feedback so far. It is greatly appreciated.

In relation to your feedback Playnoh, there is a section just with questions in it, that relate to the content. I am in the process of adding additional subtitles to the question page, to make it clearer for students to find the right pieces of content in order to answer the questions.

OP posts:
ECSpicer · 18/02/2021 13:29

@Cornishmumofone

I'd recommend looking at a theme that works better on mobile devices. I would also suggest that you consider accessibility and aiming to meet WCAG 2.1. The alt text shouldn't just be a copy of the caption, it needs to be a meaningful description of the image. At the moment the website is not keyboard navigable.
Thank you Cornishmumofone for your feedback. I will certainly look at how to make the site more accessible in due course, and the link you provided for the WCAG 2.1 looks to be incredibly useful, so thank you very much for that.
OP posts:
TakeTheCuntOutOfScunthorpe · 18/02/2021 14:14

Please take this as constructive criticism meant in good spirit, I hope it comes across that way.

My first reaction is it's a nice starting point. Presumably you will be adding more content over time? A suggestion would be to focus on one period at a time. You're trying to cover the whole of human history up to the twentieth century, that's probably too big a subject for one person to do comprehensively enough for it to be useful from an educational point of view. I'm assuming you've taken this approach because of a genuine interest in the whole of human history - good, but too much work for one person (it would be a full time job).

The "Significant People" heading only has two people in it at present. (Admittedly I'd never heard of Andreas Vesalius so I've learnt something new today!) Personally I wouldn't publish this page until you've got a few more biographies on it. It would be good as well if you linked the information in the biographies to more in depth articles elsewhere on the site. (This is what I mean about focussing on one area at a time - it would be great if George Washington's biography linked to articles on his early life, the revolutionary war, his political career, etc.)

I agree with the Cornishmumofone's suggestion about getting it working on a mobile site too. If you design it on a computer, use the browser's tools to see how it will look on a phone and tablet. (In Chrome press Ctrl+Shit+i to get "Developer Tools" up, you can then use the drop down menu at the top to select different mobile devices to preview it on - the default setting is "Responsive" but the menu has iPhone, iPad etc.)

I think some of the content would be better spread across several pages. In some cases it works - Medieval History GCSE has "The Normans in Brief" and "Edward's Death and the Claimants to the Throne" are of course linked together - but on 20th Century KS1/2 it leaps from "Life on the Titanic" to "Life in a WWI Trench". Only a few years in time but massively different subjects.

I think you have complicated things for yourself by having different target ages groups. It might be better to focus on getting plenty of content for one age group before branching out. If you prefer to tackle all age groups whilst focusing on a particular subject I would suggest trying to publish the articles for all groups at the same time. For instance in the 20th Century section you have five subjects for KS1/2, one for KS3 and none for GCSE.

I would change the landing page to a more general overview of the site - a featured article, latest updates, social media channels, that sort of thing. Move the autobiography to an "About Me" sort of page. The reason for this is that if someone stumbles across your site you want to instantly show them what the site is about, not who created it. Your "hook" is your content. (At least until you're a famous historian!)

I like the selection of images you've chosen. Some of them appear very pixelated though because presumably the source images are different sizes (eg on the "How the Romans Conquered Britain" page, the Boudica image is much sharper than the Claudius one next door).

Feel free to ignore the rest of my advice but please follow this bit: make sure you clearly label the sources for your images. The fact that they don't have this information makes it look like you've just swiped images from a Google search and used them without looking up copyright. I'm sure that's not the case but if it is, fix it before your site gets a following (unexpected letters from lawyers are never nice). I suggest Wikimedia for finding images you can use freely, but even then I would recommend listing Wikimedia as the source. And for your own images, put a copyright message next to them - it won't stop people stealing them of course, but people can't claim they weren't warned.

As it stands - it's the sort of site I'd direct people to if their homework was "find out some facts about Roman Britain" or something like that. But there's not enough detail for it to be someone's primary learning source. It's a good starting point for your project though and it's clear you have put a lot of time and care into it.

PS. There's a spelling mistake on this page "Who Ws Living In Scotland?" - not being a smartarse, just pointing it out. That's the only one I've seen so far by the way, which is a better record than the BBC site has these days. Wink

Maireas · 18/02/2021 14:16

I wouldn't recommend this to my students. The Normans section is just a basic narrative, the images from Bayeux are not explained contextually. The Treaty of Versailles section is also weak.
Maybe just concentrate on KS3?
However, you will need to provide more than a basic narrative, and the source material is not engaged with, it just seems to be to provide illustrations.

SarahAndQuack · 18/02/2021 14:20

Am I missing something?

It just looks like unreferenced opinions about history, mostly fairly descriptive.

The only use I can imagine would be students plagiarising it.

If it's going to be a historical resource, at the very least you need a bibliography section, and ideally hyperlinks to what you're paraphrasing here.

crosspelican · 18/02/2021 14:23

Speaking as a website designer and some-time historian, you need to rethink the nagivation dramatically.

Squarespace is not the right platform for this. You need Wordpress with an LMS (Learning Management System) integration or just Wordpress with a properly designed navigation. I suggest the Divi theme as they offer lots of pre-built entire websites - you just choose one that you can use for this purpose and don't mess it up.

You have lots of content, but it is very inefficiently organised and laid out. I suggest you take a look at other learning resource websites that have a bit of budget and planning behind them and look at their navigation and site layout, and take your lead from there.

Don't use cheesy graphics unless you are going to size them properly.

SarahAndQuack · 18/02/2021 14:24

On that note - I think your sources are pretty dated. I can't tell because you're not citing them. But I'm a working historian in my 30s I think you probably need to be reading some recent history for your medieval/early modern sections (not qualified to judge the rest), rather than relying on what was popular a couple of generations ago.

I'm not saying this to be harsh; I'm guessing your expertise is in a different period and you're covering masses. But as a PP says, maybe make the scope narrower?

Maireas · 18/02/2021 14:28

As Sarah has said, it does contain unreferenced opinions, which are not useful to school students. Perhaps check what needs to be delivered in school History?

ECSpicer · 18/02/2021 15:22

@crosspelican

Speaking as a website designer and some-time historian, you need to rethink the nagivation dramatically.

Squarespace is not the right platform for this. You need Wordpress with an LMS (Learning Management System) integration or just Wordpress with a properly designed navigation. I suggest the Divi theme as they offer lots of pre-built entire websites - you just choose one that you can use for this purpose and don't mess it up.

You have lots of content, but it is very inefficiently organised and laid out. I suggest you take a look at other learning resource websites that have a bit of budget and planning behind them and look at their navigation and site layout, and take your lead from there.

Don't use cheesy graphics unless you are going to size them properly.

Thank you everyone for your comments and feedback. I have thought long and hard about what you have all said, and I think in light of them, I am going to scrap what I have done, and start over again, and move over to WordPress like what crosspelican suggested.

I have saved the content onto a memory stick, so it won't be lost, and I've made a list of the alterations that you guys have suggested I make.

Thank you for your feedback and assistance. I think it may also be somewhat apparent that maybe I can't juggle balancing training to be a teacher, and create a comprehensive, well-referenced blog, maybe as well as I thought I could, as my brain is elsewhere is either focused on lesson planning, marking, etc, or on passing my PGCE.

OP posts:
Maireas · 18/02/2021 15:55

Good idea, scrap it for now.
Good luck with the PGCE.

New posts on this thread. Refresh page