Software/Website Title: Eye Witness to History
Website URL: http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/
Grade/Age Level:
This software is intended for Upper Elementary through Adults who are interested in learning about history from the Ancient World through the 20th Century. This website would be easier to understand if your first language is English, but if you are pretty fluent in English you should be able to comprehend the general idea of what it's discussing.
Language & Content:
This website is intended for learning about history from 490BC to 20th Century. It uses quotes from primary sources to describe what happened, voice clips, film clips, maps, pictures, and it provides background for these first hand accounts.
This website gives you a large variety of information. It describes to you about many different parts of history. It informs you where they acquired their information and even how to cite each individual article for school use.
This website is fairly easy to navigate. On the homepage at the top there are approximately fifteen links to take you the various sections of history. On each linked section of history, there are another approximate fifteen links to take you to each article.
It doesn't reveal this information to you on this website, but according to http://www.ibiscom.com/ eyewitnesstohistory.com has won several awards for it's informational and unique perspective on history.
This website has many strengths. It includes an incredible amount of information and presents it in an interesting way. There are many interactive articles on this site along with film & video clips and even a store where you can buy books/DVDs/ toys about history, along with many other things.
The only way I know to improve the website at this time is to make it easier to access. At times I had difficulty accessing it.
-Holly
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8 comments:
This site sounds like you could get a lot of information from it but at the same time get lost for about a week trying to find your way around. If a student is searching for particular events, does the site allow for that type of search? I'm going to email a history teacher friend of mine with this site info. They should get a kick out of it. The more info the teacher has the better. Also, you state that it 'would be earsier to understand if your first language is English,' do they have any kind of link that would help those not fluent in English? Having a store for videos and such is a great idea. I bet if the history teachers are still using the same films as when I was in school they must have to wake up half the class. (lol) Thanks for the info.
Hi Shaneta,
Yes it allows for searching the site, but it doesn't as far as I can tell have any kind of link to help those not fluent in English
Hi Holly,
A nice site enriched with photos, etc. Also, a good review!
One thing that struck me while reading your review and while browsing the site is the perspectivr from which the historical info. is written. We linguistics students read that there is no text without perspective, meaning that there is always bias. But bias can be slight, and unfortunately sometimes flagrant. Even changing a sentence from active to passive can sometimes change the perspective and hence the writer's/speaker's agendas.
One quick example from one current project I do with my advisor:
The following two sentences are driven from 2 different newswebsites, and while they seem similar, they do give different info.:
1. Taliban free French aid worker.
2. Taliban free French hostage.
As you may notice, the two words "aid worker" have different 'connotations' than the "hostage". Well, in real-world, these describe the same person. But the first headline depicts the man as sb who helps others, while the second depects him as helpless.
So, do you think that the website adopts a certain perspective?
Thanks for giving us the chance to discuss such interesting issues.
(Quickly: the following is an interesting article that discusses similar issues from a linguistic/ideological perspective:
Fowler, R. (1991). Discrimination in discourse: Gender and power. Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology in the Press (pp. 91-109). London: Routledge.)
--Muhammad!
Hey,
just forgot to let you know that the link to the website has some spelling mistake. You can quickly edit it.
Muhammad!
Holly, this site seems interesting. (That's saying a lot from someone who doesn't really care for history!) There are good attention grabbers on the site, but I was also distracted by the adverstisments. I wish we had options for getting rid of those. It makes it very difficult to find websites to teach with when so many have ads that are flashing at our students, especially when there are rolling ads in which some may be inappropriate!
In response to Shaneta's question, there are certain programs that can be used that will take all the words on a website and allow you to click on one at any point to hear it or define it. Something like that could be used to help with students who are not completely comfortable with the language used. Anyway, nice find!
Susan
Hi Holly,
I like the information, specifically the visual aids,in this website. I agree that this might be a little bit difficult to L2 learners. The long articles may look intimidating to L2 learners. I wonder how L2 teachers can help students to make use the information here.What do you think?
Yu-ju
Just to inform you that my late-started Blog URL is: http://sampsblog.blogspot.com/
-sam
I've used this website with even my lowest level ESOL students. For these kids I focus mainly on the Snapshots and sections that incorporate all of the photos. In some cases (since I teach with a laptop and an LCD projector) I will cut and paste the photos into a power point presentation so I don't scare off the kids (great points about L2 learner intimidation!)
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