Digital history

Although there are no longer any formal requirements within the Teacher Standards relating to the effective use of IT in teaching, nor any specific statements relating to students’ use of digital resources within the National Curriculum in England, technology has vastly enriched the teaching and learning of history in recent years. The resources here focus specifically on the ways in which learning history can be enhanced through the use of technology; whether this relates to the access and analysis of sources, to the processes of constructing different kinds of historical accounts (dramas, debates and documentaries as well as different kinds of written explanation and argument), or to the means by which young people can share their investigative tasks and the outcomes of what they have learned, giving them a ‘real’ audience for their work. 

Sort by: Date (Newest first) | Title A-Z
Show: All | Articles | Podcasts | Multipage Articles

  • Using Twitter in the History Classroom

    Article

    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,...

    Click to view

  • Using databases to explore the real depth in the data

    Article

    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...

    Click to view

  • Using oral history to enhance a local history partnership

    Article

    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...

    Click to view

  • Using the Internet to teach about interpretations in Years 9 and 12

    Article

    Are you getting fed up of ICT experts and others telling you to watch out for ‘bias’ in websites? Have you sat open-mouthed through a training session or staff meeting where the need to teach pupils to be critical of what they find on the web is sagely discussed, as...

    Click to view

  • Weighing a century with a website: teaching Year 9 to be critical

    Article

    Two years ago the history department at Hampstead School was one of two history departments chosen to model very effective use of IT in history for a BECTA research study. Two years on, what has the department been up to? All of the factors identified in that study -an ICT...

    Click to view

  • What do you think? Using online forums to improve students' historical knowledge and understanding

    Article

    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...

    Click to view

  • When computers don't give you a headache: the most able lead a debate on medicine through time

    Article

    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...

    Click to view