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Hot Air Balloon Disaster
Helping students to make judgements about relative importance All of the important figures in history are in a hot air balloon whose engine is broken. Who do you throw out first to ensure the rest survive?! History is full of people and a key skill is to get our students to think about the relative importance…
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Plickers for History Teachers: a Great Tool for Assessment
I have to admit in the beginning – I was not searching for Plickers! But now that I have found the app and tried it out with my students it’s going to stay with us. My students and I love it. To explain what Plickers is I will start by using the sentence from the…
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Using @Twitter to promote historical thinking and improve your teaching
For a couple of years now I have been using @Twitter to help my students get better at studying history and to improve my own teaching practice. The use of such an obviously social media may still seem odd to some of you, but I hope I can persuade you that it has a place…
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The 3D-Gallery Generator
This is a digital tool from Russell Tarr’s popular www.classtools.net site. Your students create a virtual 3D gallery. To do this they need to act as the curator of their own exhibition. Curation requires them to develop criteria to decide what to select to put into their exhibition. They then create the gallery and justify…
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Using Arts and Culture to Overcome Barriers to Field Trips
Getting students out of school to visit historic sites is difficult. I teach in the UK and here we have to fill in loads of paperwork – risk assessments, parent permission slips. It’s all a bit of a nightmare. But field trips to historic sites are a fundamental part of the magic of our subject.…