Overview As digital archives of history articles become increasingly accessible for students and teachers, it’s easy for print versions of of magazines [...]
5th October 2019
Making the most of old History magazines
Lotus diagram templates for essay planning
8th November 2018
Three free essay-writing tools from ClassTools.net
Overview Essay-writing skills in history are crucially important to develop but notoriously difficult to measure in final exams. Although official mark [...]
23rd June 2018
Sticky Notes for Silent Presentations
Overview To help students exchange their research findings with each other in a particularly time-efficient way, challenge each of them to summarise their [...]
19th February 2018
How to use “Backward Essays” to cover lots of content at high speed
Overview When covering content-heavy programmes of study, time is always tight. Rather than delivering lengthy, in-depth lectures or getting students to [...]
7th February 2018
“Destroy or Deploy?”: A strategy for integrating fresh sources into classroom debates
Overview When preparing students for a classroom debate, present the class with a wide variety of relevant sources. After giving students time to move [...]
13th November 2017
“Quote them out of context”: a ‘Fake News’ exercise for evaluating sources
Overview Newpaper reports inlcuding extracts from political speeches and interviews are often used as primary source material in the history classroom. To [...]
23rd September 2017
Using “EyeSay!” to give visual feedback on student essays
Overview “EyeSay!” is a new tool I have coded at www.classtools.net to help students and teachers get a useful visualisation of essay style and [...]
19th April 2017
Student Bookmark: vocabulary for essay writing
Overview In order to help students develop a wider range of vocabulary for their extended writing, I have produced the following bookmark which can be [...]
3rd April 2017
Develop persuasive vocabulary with a ‘biased words knockout challenge’
Overview One important literacy skill is for students to use (and, increasingly, to spot) writing which is designed to persuade rather than merely inform. [...]
7th March 2017
Using Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions to improve the evaluation of sources
25th January 2017
Data-driven history lessons: “How could geographers help us to answer this question?”
Overview In a subject like history, a common pitfall for students is to make sweeping assertions which are not backed up with hard data. This is often the [...]
12th December 2016
“Tell us something we don’t know!”: A quiz to develop deeper understanding
Overview For examination subjects, content is king. Without a secure bedrock of factual knowledge, analysis cannot be attempted and evaluation and [...]
9th December 2016
Using Emojis to develop vocabulary and source analysis skills
Overview Emoji icons are handy little images to represent a particular feeling or concept in visual form that can often be seen in text messages, tweets [...]
15th November 2016
Use an “Image Jigsaw” to arrange class groups
Overview Instead of dividing the class into groups using the Random Name Picker or some other method, take a series of interesting images relating to the [...]
14th November 2016
Use an ‘Image Flash’ to engage students with pictorial sources
Overview Rather than present students with an image on the screen and immediately start discussing what they can see and what it might mean, provide them [...]
14th November 2016
Online citation generator for student projects
Overview Most online citation generators need the students to do most of the hard work – and only look for books. So I coded this online citation [...]
17th July 2016
10 creative approaches for developing essay-writing skills
13th April 2016
Visual essay-writing: cartoons, sticky-notes and plenty of collaboration!
To develop analytical and essay-writing skills in a collaborative and engaging manner, start by gathering a series of photographs relating to the topic in [...]
17th December 2015
Use a ‘Banned Word List’ to encourage deeper thinking
Overview As a history teacher there are certain words and phrases which make me wince when I see them being used by examination students. I therefore use [...]
16th December 2015
Compare first paragraph of several books to analyse stylistic techniques
Overview The art of writing a good introduction to an essay is something which students need to regularly reflect on. I encourage students to ensure that [...]
29th November 2015
Sketch-noting and beyond: let your students choose their own note-taking strategy!
Overview Effective note-taking is a vital skill for students, but by no means a simple one to teach or to learn. From my experience, students have to be [...]
22nd October 2015
“Half a Source”, or “How will this story end?”: The perfect question to promote engagement with sources
The increasingly accessible nature of online video and textual sources means that it is now easier than ever to watch short clips from films and video [...]
1st June 2015