Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content and links may be outdated.

Images allow us to step back in time and ask important historical questions such as ‘Were the Victorians just like us?' Growing digitisation and the spread of the internet allow teachers and learners unprecedented access to historic images and provide a plethora of new ways to use them.

Images are powerful. Take pupils into the centre of your local town or village to observe and record the scene in the morning and in the afternoon fill your interactive whiteboard with an image of that same scene taken 50, 100, possibly even 150 years ago. The questions and observations will flow naturally. What has changed? What is the same? What would we have seen, heard and smelled when the photograph was taken? What did we see, hear and smell this morning? When did that building disappear? Why was that building built? What did...