OP-ED: Teaching History with 100 objects website

This website evaluation is over the Teaching History with 100 objects website. This is a website has 100 objects that are used to educate children and also can educate adults about different objects from around the world. This is done with the help of many museums around the U.K. These museums collaborate together to further education in the class room. These places were these museums are including Wales, England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The museums in these areas are working with The British Museum to provide the service of helping teachers to be able to teach their students a history program in England. This website is funded by the Department for Education. This program is used to grab the attention of the students by allowing the educators to use the techniques of the website.

Over all when speaking about how the objects are set up I enjoy how it is presented. There is a brief description under the picture if the object. It shows where it is from. This includes a small map of where the area is. It gives details on what some of the materials that the object is made of are and where the materials are from. It will try to give the name of the person who made it. If it is not possible then the description will say that the creator is unknown. If the creator is known then there are links to other pieces that they have created. There are also links related to other pieces of the time that the object is in and also might have links related to other information about a certain person that is shown in the object or people who are responsible for its creation.

On the right hand side of a particular object there are four tabs going down. These are About the Object, the Bigger Picture, Teaching ideas and For the Classroom. In About the Object here are details on what time, culture and museum that the object is from. There are also links to projects related to an object that are being taken place at different universities. In the Bigger Picture tells more about who the piece is over. It shows more about who the person was and some have the things that this person had done as well as some of the things that they have been through. Teaching ideas shows how to take the object and use it to educate and shows what ways that this certain object can be used to educate. This is done by doing different methods. Some of these methods that are suggested are ones such as comparing and consenting other object similar to that one the is being studied, and look at other views of the object by other people that had lived in this time. In For the Classroom there are articles and videos about the object as well as articles and videos that pertain the person that the object is about or who created it.

One object that I had looked at was metal horse trappings. I didn’t know that they could show social ranking in a society. I like the designs of the object. The objet has blue designs with a red background. I didn’t know vehicle pulled by horses were used exclusively by the social elite. It was interesting to find out about chariot burials. The woman was a 35-45 year old woman found buried. This burial was in Wetwang. I liked finding out that both men and women had found objects like this.

When I had went through the website I had found that it was very user friendly. For me the website was very easy to navigate through. I like how there are picture of the objects that someone can just click on instead of just a listing of what object that are in the collection. I think it is a good idea to have the pictures. This is because having the pictures captures attention.

This website is intended for education in schools. It seems this is a very good teaching tool for any level of education. It is also a good learning tool for people that are in the general public. It is good because I feel that some can either be taught with this or learn by themselves at any level of learning.

The website Teaching History with 100 objects was very informative. There was a lot of information about each of the 100 objects. With that there was also more information related to the objects. Some of these included links related to the subject about the object, other university works on the object, other university works on history of the culture or persons that the object is based on, and videos of things that are related to each of the objects. The site gives educators idea on how to use the information and is good to be used by the general public. This is a great project that was put together by museums across the U.K. and then Department for Education.