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SHP Conf 12: Saturday under way

Saturday morning is half way through the SHP conference, and always a great session as you pick up two workshops in quick succession. Then you talk to others over lunch, decide to change your mind over where to go for workshops D & E – (Never mind the signing up boards) And then you realise you can’t do everything.  Some schools send two people and plan a strategic route through the Conference. Twitter #shp is busy, and a good way of getting a flavour of workshops you couldn’t go to. Twitter + a link to the schools forum works well.

Good to see some workshops giving the breath of life to some yawny topics – Ben Walsh on theTreaty of Versailles (next year the League of Nations – can he keep us awake?), and Richard McFahn of the Industrial Revolution.  How do you breathe life?  Add some good history, some good stories, get behind the cliches, find the personalities… and the passion.

I wonder how many people at the Euroclio session on Friday evening, hearing Jonathan and Steven talk about obdurate governments in “far off countries of which we know little”, made a few mental links to where we find ourselves this July?  Good school history = essential for democracy.

Tribute to all the brave people doing their first SHP workshop, putting their carefully-nurtured ideas in front of 20 strangers. Lots of brilliant ideas – big ones, little ones.  90 minutes later the 20 interesting teachers not strangers any more.

Strong IT flavour this year: 2012 looks like the breakthrough time to me, when clever ideas with ipads, iphones, phone text get beyond the committed few.

[I wonder what Ian’s got in store for us this evening.  I haven’t got a script…… Ominous?]

Chris

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