Spartacus Educational

Technology and the History Classroom: Should the Teaching Profession Embrace Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

Today the main issue facing teachers is the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Teachers rightly fear that AI poses a threat. Will AI mean less teachers being employed? Will it result in teachers being less qualified as it is the computer who is doing the teaching?

In the span of my 50-year career teaching history in the classroom and online, the quest for more effective teaching and learning methods has always been at the centre of my ambitions. I believe AI provides a tremendous opportunity to dramatically improve the quality of education in our schools. However, for this to happen teachers need to play the dominant role in the way it is introduced and developed. These AI programs need to be produced by experienced teachers and funded by the state. This material will then be used by all schools and in the long term they will not need to spend as much money on books and software.

In September, 1997, Spartacus Educational founder and managing director John Simkin became the first educational publisher in Britain to establish a website that was willing to provide teachers and students with free educational materials.

According to a survey carried out by the Fischer Trust, Spartacus Educational is one of the top three websites used by history teachers and students in Britain (the other two are BBC History and the Public Record Office’s Learning Curve). The Spartacus Educational website currently gets up to 7 million page impressions a month and 3 million unique visitors.

As well as running the Spartacus Educational website John Simkin has also produced material for the Electronic Telegraph, the European Virtual School and the Guardian's educational website, Learn. He was also a member of the European History E-Learning Project (E-Help), a project to encourage and improve use of ICT and the internet in classrooms across the continent.

We have published six e-books, Charles Dickens: A Biography (October, 2012), First World War Encyclopedia (October, 2012), Assassination of John F. Kennedy Encyclopedia (November, 2012), Gandhi: A Biography (December, 2012), The Spanish Civil War (December, 2012) and The American Civil War (December, 2012). He also contributed an article to the recently published book, Using New Technologies to Enhance Teaching and Learning in History (December, 2012).