Greg Fitzpatrick:

Chris Higgins: Chris Higgins is a history teacher at Invicta Grammar School, Maidstone, having taught English in Italy for many years. He specialises in the use of ICT in teaching and learning and is Deputy Director for e-Learning at his school. Chris has also written widely for educational newspapers and journals, including the TES and ‘ICT Across the Curriculum’. He regularly takes part in teacher training workshop for a variety of organisations including the ‘Hands-On Support’ network and Canterbury Christ Church University College.

David Richardson: My name's David Richardson and I'm not really a History teacher at all! I was asked by John if I'd like to be associated with the E-HELP project and he reassured me that you need people who've used ICT tools in education, and people who've witnessed bits of history too!
I'm a teacher of EFL (English as a Foreign Language), working as co-ordinator of distance education in English at a university in southern Sweden. I do teach British and US Culture and Society sometimes, and that involves a fair bit of history, though.
I've been working with computers in education for a long while too. I've also programmed Sinclair ZXs and Apple IIes, but, like Mike, I'm still very computationally challenged. I've been working with the human side of things - if you like the C (communication) bit of ICT, rather than the I (Information) bit.
If you click on the Distance Courses link in the bar at the top of this page, you'll come to our distance courses page. The links on the left lead to live courses … but we never think that people learn solely - or even mainly - from computer screens, so most of our courses are quite difficult to understand 'from the outside', so to speak. You need all the rest (Study Guides, lectures on CD, friendly comments from Internet tutors, etc) to really make sense of them. The Business Writing course is entirely web-based, though, so that's a bit of a stand-alone.
I'm looking forward to working with you all - it's always interesting to see how people from other subject disciplines approach course design. And there's always some idea that's worth stealing!!

Peter Tollmar: My name is Peter Tollmar and I teach History, Social studies, Basic Computer skills, Design history and a subject called Technology, Man and Society (TMS) at Fredrika Bremergymnasiet in Haninge, Sweden. I also run a project called the Learning Bridge (www.learningbridge.nu) with Dalibor Svoboda, which was the first school based internet project in Sweden when it started in 1991 (I joined in 1997). In Learning Bridge our students collaborate with American students over the internet, raise money and go visit them for two weeks.
Since I started teaching, and since I joined the Learning Bridge, I have been more and more involved and interested in using ICT and computers, and here are some of my experiences:
a. I have my own web site, www.tollmar.com/skola (mainly in Swedish) where I post all my classes and exercises, and also some student work.
b. I lived 6 months in New York City in 2003 and had distance learning with two of my classes back in Sweden. I was usning my web-page, e-mail and a discussionforum created in FrontPage.
c. All senior students in Sweden have to do an independent project. For the last two years I’ve had students doing a project called “Virtual Historic Movies”, where the make their own historical documentaries without leaving the classroom by using movie clips downloaded from the Prelinger archive at www.archive.org in combination with stills and their own voice-over.
d. In Learning Bridge we work with Digital Storytelling. The students make digital stories about someone in their life who has been important to their personal development, by combining scanned images, music and voice-over etc in Windows Moviemaker.
e. Instead of teaching the Basic Computer course, Design History and TMS as separate courses I fuse them into one course. Assigments I give my students can be “make a Q&A game about Bauhaus using Powerpoint”, “make a short movie about postmodern design using Windows Moviemaker” or “do a cartoon in Powerpoint where a painting by Mondrian is turned into a De Stijl-table”. I then evaluate the content for the Design history grade and the presentation for the Computer course grade.
These are some of the things I do and have been doing in the past.

Ben Walsh: My name is Ben Walsh. Like many of the others in this discussion I have been approached by John as he feels I may be able to contribute something to E-HELP (reading these messages reminds me of the early part of the classic western movie The Magnificent Seven where the team is gathered together!).
I was a teacher and head of history in schools in England for many years. In the mid 1990s I left teaching to work for a small educational publisher, which was where I learned my computer skills. I was given an office and a Mac – the training consisted of someone saying ‘here’s your office and your Mac’.
From there I went back to teaching part time and now teach at Stafford College in the English West Midlands and the rest of my time was on a series of freelance projects. This included being one of the History Project Officers for the National Council for Educational Technology or NCET (which has now been renamed BECTA, presumably because NCET was much too clear and informative a title). This involved exploring the many different ways in which computers had been and could be used to help teachers teach history. We then published resources for students and teachers and did a lot of work disseminating our ideas and resources. I seem to have been disseminating ever since, running courses on how ICT can enhance history teaching all over the UK and a few in various parts of Europe and North America.
I also spend a lot of time writing resources. As well as paper textbooks, I have been lucky enough to bump into many colleagues from various archives who have an interest in getting their material out to a wider audience and think that the electronic medium is the best way to do this. I have been responsible for many of the resources on the National Archives Learning Curve web site (http://www.learningcurve.gov.uk/). I was also one of the authors on the series of CD ROMs called ‘Sources In History’ produced by the British Library but now sadly no longer available. You will also find me involved in numerous other projects relating to digital archive materials, particularly the British Pathe web site. I am especially excited at the moment bny the use of archive footage along with digital video editing software to get students making their own history documentaries.
I hope I could offer something to the project in terms of observations from the classroom, not just of developing and using resources but also the practical experience of being hampered by management and technical problems and hopefully a few strategies to get around some of these problems. I think my experiences in helping to bring archives to a wider audience might also be helpful.