Neomi Shiloah and Edna Shoham show how history teachers in Israel have begun to move away from traditional talk-and-chalk based teaching. They describe a blend of role-play and ICT that not only grabs pupils’ attention and caters for different styles of learning but also helps pupils to appreciate the difficulties faced by nineteenth-century politicians. By being forced to make their own decisions about the best direction for German foreign policy, pupils are motivated to produce a sophisticated analysis of the reasons why, following the Franco-Prussian War, Bismarck dealt with a surprisingly revitalised France by forming alliances, rather than by direct aggression. The authors describe two ways of teaching this: the first secured considerable success in student ownership and motivation; the second, using ICT, went further, giving the students control over the initial knowledge acquisition as well the more analytic and imaginative work that followed. They observe that collaboration between students became an integral part of the learning.