• Teaching Strategy: Family and Relations

    Helping students to get to engage with the biography of an important historical figure Students take on the role of people who have to explain their relationship to a leading historical figure, thereby broadly mapping out his or her biography. Students are given a person that is in some way related to the historical actor…

  • Teaching Strategy: Planning a Documentary

    Helping students to decide the relative importance of different factors, events or changes Students plan a documentary by deciding how much time should be allocated to given topics. Students imagine they are planning a one-hour documentary. The teacher gives them a list of topics that need to be included. They plan by labeling and shading…

  • Skitch: having a quick sketch to improve history learning

    Quite often in my class I want to draw on top of a source, or onto a bit of writing I have on my whiteboard. I cannot quite work out how the complicated interactive whiteboard pens work. That was where Skitch came to the rescue. Skitch is a free iPad or Android app that allows…

  • Human timeline for developing chronological understanding

    Helping students to develop their chronological understanding Using students wearing paper tabards as a human timeline to demonstrate sequencing and change over time. By being a human timeline the teacher can test students understanding of key historical terms. The students can more easily understand sequencing. They can also see change and continuity over time. By making…

  • MindMup: An effective digital tool to support historical thinking

    One day as a home assignment I set my students the task of creating a mind map. Next day during the lesson one student said that she had found a really useful online tool for mind maps. She shared it with us and now I am sharing it with you. It’s called MindMup. Why should…