This is another post that’s been sitting in draft form for weeks. I started it after I demoed Twitter to my old PGCE tutor, and thought a post online where I could direct history teachers new to Twitter would be a useful thing to have… When I started as a History teacher I was lucky […]
Schama on History (5 minutes with…)
Flicking through some links, I came across the ‘Five Minutes With…’ videos on the BBC website, including one with Simon Schamawho is one of my favourite ‘popularises of History’.Well worth a watch if you’ve got a spare 5 and a half minutes, not least for this wonderful quote which will be added to my wall […]
Visiting 1780
I was looking for a new way of kicking off the year 12 AS British History course which I teach, when I remembered an interview I’d read somewhere, by someone, saying something about the 1780s (the start of the course). After some Googling [1. First time I’ve really had to think about what search terms […]
Communism vs Capitalism for yr 9
Trying to introduce the ideas of Communism and Capitalism to students can be tricky, but necessary if you’re going to try and teach the Cold War. I’d got the idea of getting students to work out how much money they had in their pockets, and how they would be affected by a switch to communism […]
The Missing Blog Posts: Pt 1 – Teachmeet SHP
I realised the other day that I’ve got a stack of posts that I thought I’d published that are actually still waiting to be finished. I’m going to try and get them out in the next few days. In this case I thought I’d already blogged this, but unless I’m going mad I can’t see […]
16th Century Facebook
I’m concious of a backlog of half finished posts, but here’s one I can put up quickly. Emma sent round a link to this newsbiscuit story about Henry VIII lying on his match.com profile as a starter for our work on the Tudors which will be kicking off in half term. Never having been a […]
WCYDWT? #3 Castles
In some ways the first two ideas I’ve blogged about since I tried to hijack WCYDWT for my own nefarious history type purposes haven’t quite lived up to Dan’s Standard. They’re both good ways into lessons, and they both do a good job of creating interest in something that may not be (for many students) […]
What I did with this: The World Turned Upside Down
[kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.youtube.com/v/stmiyeLsErw” width=”425″ height=”344″ allowfullscreen=”true” fvars=”fs=1″ /] Ingredients: The World Turned Upside by Billy Bragg (for example the Youtube version above) Lyrics to the above song 1 guitar and a rudimentary knowledge thereof (the chords E, B and A if you want to play it in the same key) Willingness to face down a class […]
What I did with this: Losing your head
[Original post, plus some great follow up comments can be found here] Meet my friend, the crop button. Or, if you’re lucky enough to be using Keynote, his cousin the mask button. The picture is actually quite engaging in itself, but there’s still a good chance that a good percentage of students will tune about […]
Asking questions trumps being told facts.
Our second history coursework piece asks students to analyse different interpretations of why men from Wales went to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Rather than march through the background to the war (which I’ve done in the past, and did with the content for the first coursework topic) I decided to start with Viva […]