Digital history

Although there are no longer any formal requirements within the Teacher Standards relating to the effective use of IT in teaching, nor any specific statements relating to students’ use of digital resources within the National Curriculum in England, technology has vastly enriched the teaching and learning of history in recent years. The resources here focus specifically on the ways in which learning history can be enhanced through the use of technology; whether this relates to the access and analysis of sources, to the processes of constructing different kinds of historical accounts (dramas, debates and documentaries as well as different kinds of written explanation and argument), or to the means by which young people can share their investigative tasks and the outcomes of what they have learned, giving them a ‘real’ audience for their work. 

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  • Using oral history to enhance a local history partnership

    Article

    Eliza West and Emily Toettcher explain how a partnership between school and museum has evolved into a four-year enquiry into local history. The article focuses on the successful introduction of an oral history element in the GCSE syllabus and how the investigation into ‘remembered’ history helps students to appreciate the complexities of truth...

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  • Harnessing the power of community to expand students’ historical horizons

    Article

    Many history teachers will already be familiar with ‘meanwhile, elsewhere...’, a website offering freely downloadable homework resources on individuals, events and developments in world history. In this article the website’s creators, Richard Kennett and Will Bailey-Watson, set out a curricular rationale for the project. They argue that using homework tasks...

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  • Using Google Docs to develop Year 9 pupils’ essay-writing skills

    Article

    Lucy Moonen set out to explore whether collaborative writing in small groups, facilitated by the use of Google Docs, would help to sustain students’ focus on essay writing as the development of an historical argument. She explains how she set up an essay on the League of Nationals as a...

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  • Using databases to explore the real depth in the data

    Article

    Is it a good thing to have a lot of evidence? Surely the historian would answer that yes, it is: the more evidence that can be used, the better. The problem with this approach, though, is that too much data can be overwhelming for the history student - and, in...

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  • Triumphs Show 160: Prezi and propaganda

    Article

    Laura Tilley recognised that her Year 9 students were finding it difficult to work out the intended message of visual propaganda. To help her students make better use of the substantive knowledge they already had, she devised an interactive activity using a presentation software, Prezi. This approach provided students with...

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  • Using Twitter in the History Classroom

    Article

    This attached report is by Dave Martin on an H. A. action research project where three schools in Dorset experimented with using Twitter in their teaching of history. They used Twitter to explore multiple viewpoints from the battlefield at Hastings, to ask an author about the process of writing historical fiction,...

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  • Developing pupil explanation through web debates

    Article

    Kathryn Greenfield became dissatisfied with her pupils' written responses, particularly the rather limited explanations that they were giving in support of points that they made. Drawing here on recent work in using Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) to develop pupil historical argument and reasoning, Greenfield explains how she used web debates...

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  • Triumphs Show 148.1: collaborating to commemorate Olaudah Equiano

    Article

    How a drink in the bar at the SHP conference - and discovery of a shared interest in ICT - led to the campaign for a Blue Plaque for an eighteenth-century abolitionist. What do the 1970 Brazil World Cup-winning team, Charles Darwin and Vanilla Ice all have in common? This...

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  • What do you think? Using online forums to improve students' historical knowledge and understanding

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. In Teaching History 126, the Open University's Arguing in History project team demonstrated the power that discussion fora can have to develop pupil thinking. In this article, Dave Martin revisits this theme through a discussion...

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  • Stories and their sources: the need for historical thinking in an information age

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. Information technology is of no value in itself or by itself: it needs questions to drive it and disciplined forms of thinking to make sense of the answers that it can provide. Inspired by the...

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  • Making pupils want to explain: using Movie Maker to foster thoroughness and self-monitoring

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. Sally Burnham shares her practice and reflections on the value of the software, ‘Movie Maker', for developing particular aspects of historical thinking and learning. In Teaching History 130, in the context of her Key Stage...

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  • 11 Ways to Use Multimedia Videos in History Lessons

    Article

    Dan Moorhouse provides: 11 ways to use multimedia videos in lessons: 1)      To develop an understanding of the ways in which different interpretations of events are formed. For example, pupils may study Cromwell and his times and may then be asked to consider how and for what purpose a particular interpretation...

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  • British History Online - Digital Resources

    Article

    British History Online is the digital library containing some of the core printed primary and secondary sources for the medieval and modern history of the British Isles. Created by the Institute of Historical Research and the History of Parliament Trust, we aim to support academic and personal users around the...

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  • Miss, now I can see why that was so important: using ICT to enrich overview at GCSE

    Article

    Reflection and evaluation are key tools in the box of the successful history teacher. However, a focus on resources or exam results is futile unless a desire to develop pupils’ historical understanding is at the heart of the evaluation process. Maria Osowiecki’s department faced two problems: how to develop their...

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  • When computers don't give you a headache: the most able lead a debate on medicine through time

    Article

    Dan Moorhouse begins with a complaint about ICT. It is not the clichéd teacher-complaint – that the computers keep crashing, and the students are messing around on the Internet (and how, exactly, do you turn the things on?) Instead, he observes that the use of ICT in the classroom is...

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  • Keeping the kids on message...one school's attempt at helping sixth form students to engage in historical debating using ICT

    Article

    At post-16 level, keeping the ‘kids’ on message is critical. Teaching and learning must be focused on the relatively narrow goals of the examination syllabus, but set within broader historical and historiographical contexts. Students need to how know, and where, to fit their ideas into those of existing historians. Ideally...

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  • Conceptual awareness through categorising: using ICT to get Year 13 reading

    Article

    When presenting their practical approaches to post-16 teaching in Teaching History 103, both Richard Harris and Rachael Rudham argued that students need to ‘do’ things with information, to process it, play with it, classify it, if they are ever to understand or remember it. They made a case for not...

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  • 'You be Britain and I'll be Germany...' Inter-school e-mailing in Year 9

    Article

    E-mailing is fast becoming our preferred means of communication and for good reason. It is immediate: we can fire off a few lines and receive a reply within seconds. It is also flexible: unlike a telephone conversation, we do not have to reply there and then; we can go away...

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  • Computers don't bite! Your first tentative steps in using ICT in the classroom.

    Article

    This article is for beginners. It will also provide perspectives and ideas for those training history teachers in the use of ICT for improving pupils’ learning. Drawing upon his experience in managing the HA’s NOF training programme, Alf Wilkinson outlines some practical activities that are ideal for getting the novice...

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  • From anecdote to argument: using the word processor to connect knowledge and opinion through revelatory writing

    Article

    Jayne Prior and Peter John argue that it is time to build upon what has been learned about historical writing using ICT and to acknowledge both opportunities and dangers in some current and popular practice. Critical of some of the weaker uses of ‘cut and paste’ activities, where pupils are...

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