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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

Teaching the iGeneration: what possibilities exist in and beyond the history classroom? The development of communications technology in recent years has not only changed the ways in which students can access their world: it also changes the way they think about it. Sheldrake and Watkin draw here upon work that...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...