The National Archives has joined forces with South East Grid for Learning to redevelop the ever-popular OnFilm section of the Learning Curve and provide an enlarged archive of original film clips with full background information, newly developed classroom activities and a stunning online video-editing tool that will allow students to work directly with the materials.
This is an exciting project inspired by the life of a Victorian child prisoner. It features a play created and performed by 26 young people. This is the first time that young people have helped us to build an accessible resource for Learning Curve. Relevant to KS3 Victorian Britain, the play and historical documents that shaped the project also offer cross-curricular links to Citizenship and English.
In June of this year Prisoner 4099 won a Jodi Award from the Museums, Libraries and Archives council. Presented at a ceremony at the British Museum, the awards recognise the most innovative use of technology to provide access to collections and learning for disabled people.
History & Literacy: Victorian Child Criminals Poetry Workshop
Preparation materials, documents and photographs for this onsite education workshop are now available online and downloadable for free. Pupils can investigate Victorian attitudes to crime and punishment, as well as the social and economic background of this period and then go on to study the Prison Record of a little boy named Henry Munday, and use his experiences as a stimulus for creative writing. Suitable for Key stage 2.
What was it like to be an airman in WWII? - Gordon Ford’s Story 
New Zealand Squadron 27 wireless operator Gordon Ford describes a WWII bombing mission
to Dortmund in this snapshot mixing a recent video interview with documents from the National Archives. Suitable for Key Stage 2.
Bussa’s Rebellion - How and why did the enslaved Africans of Barbados rebel in 1816?
This snapshot looks into how an African born enslaved man called Bussa led the rebellion on Barbados, and the consequences of this rebellion. Suitable for Key Stage 3.
The king, the crown and the colonel: How did Thomas Blood try to steal the crown jewels in 1671?
Thomas (“Captain”) Blood was a rebel and master of disguise. What happened when he tried to steal the crown jewels? Suitable for Key Stage 3.
Onsite Education Service preparation materials for our videoconference on the causes of the English Civil Wars are now available online. Students take part in a debate with actors in role as Puritan Adam Wright and Royalist Bishop Richard Hyde.
This is the first in a new series of downloadable resources called Hands-on-History designed for teachers and students to use with interactive whiteboards. Similar to Snapshots in their "lesson-ready" design, this series complements the existing materials available on Learning Curve and supports both whole-class and student groupwork. Hands-on-History is currently available for Smartboard’s Notebook software but we aim to expand this to include other popular whiteboard formats as soon as possible.
The latest programme to feature The National Archives and The Learning Curve is now available online. "Using Institutions" gives an excellent insight into how schools use National Archives resources.
Visit Teachers.TV
Our massive new Second World War online exhibition. Explore seven theatres of war spanning the whole of the conflict with twenty different investigations for students and hundreds of documents, sound files and film clips.
Alf Wilkinson is currently Professional Development Manager for the Historical Association. He was Head of History and then ICT Co-ordinator at a large comprehensive school in Bedford for over 20 years before leaving to run the Historical Association NOF training. He has written text books for Key Stage 3 and delivers lots of CPD to both primary and secondary history teachers.
The world wide web has revolutionised the teaching and learning of history. Putting it bluntly, there is an awful lot of ‘stuff’ out there, and much of it isn’t very good. In the ‘good old days’ the cry used to be ‘How do we get hold of the documents/photos/films/resources?’ Now the argument is often ‘How do we make sense of all that material?’
Some sites have a reputation for getting it right, and the Learning Curve is one of them. I have no hesitation in putting it at the top of my recommended sites. The sheer range of resources available for teachers is amazing.
The Exhibitions can at first appear daunting, especially if you only have limited access to ICT. But they are all broken down into useable chunks and imaginatively present difficult topics in an appealing way. My favourite is the Cold War – often a hard topic to teach. It uses documents and sources in a way that is guaranteed to appeal to students and teachers alike.
At the other end of the scale are the Snapshots. These are single lessons, sometimes based on just a single document, but always asking provocative questions. One that I particularly like is Say Cheese!: Queen Victoria’s Family Photograph because it dispels the myth of a distant and ‘frosty’ figure, but also helps students learn to interrogate photographs which are a very important source of evidence – but which still need to be read as carefully as any other source! Other favourites are Post-War Immigration: Bound for Britain which explores the fate of some of the Windrush immigrants; and Captain Cook in Hawaii. Both are very human documents, telling a clear story, and using materials that would have been very hard to come by pre-internet days.
And, of course, it is important to mention podcasts. It is vital for A Level students to hear academic experts and opinion. This helps them to make up their own ideas and arguments. The one by Barry Coward, the Historical Association President, on Cromwell and the Protectorate is a particularly good example of this. This is a recording of an A Level lecture we ran.
One of the most frequent questions I get asked is about sources of film, and the Focus on Film section offers plenty of clips for use in the classroom. One I frequently use is the Public Information Film on the Berlin Airlift which gives a perfect feel for the period as well as being excellent for interpretations of the causes of the Cold War.
Finally, I must mention the new section, Whiteboard: downloadable resources, using National Archives materials. Invaluable! But don’t forget to get your copy of the Teachers Booklet – a great guide to using the site but also a terrific CPD guide for those wanting further advice on using ICT effectively in teaching and learning history.
September
5th September 1666: After burning for days, the Great Fire of London is finally put out. Find out more about what happened.
8th September 1944: First V2 rocket attack on Britain kills three and injures 22. How did Britain respond to this terrifying new weapon?
9th September 1087: William the Conqueror dies in France, at the age of 59, after a fall from a horse. How can we find out about England during his reign?
October
16th October 1793: Marie Antoinette, once Queen of France, is executed in Paris. Her husband Louis XVI was guillotined in January. What was the reaction in Britain to the French revolution?
27th October 1728: James Cook is born in Yorkshire. Cook first went to sea as a teenager and was made a captain in 1775. But why did he meet an untimely death in Hawaii?
30th October 1961: The Soviet Union detonates the world’s largest manmade explosion, the 50 megaton Tsar Bomba. Decide how close the world came to a nuclear winter in our Cold War exhibition.
November
4th November 1854: Florence Nightingale arrives with 38 other women in Turkey to work at the barrack hospital in Scutari. Why do we remember her?
7th November 1957: Prime Minister Anthony Eden is forced by American pressure to call a ceasefire to the British attacks on Suez. Now seen as perhaps Britain’s biggest foreign disaster of the postwar 20th century watch what Britons at the time were told about Suez.
15th November 1515: Thomas Wolsey is made a Cardinal by Pope Leo X. He is one of Henry VIII’s most trusted advisors. Read his Eltham Ordinances and find out how Henry got up in the morning.
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For a free guide on Learning Curve and ICT in history, download our updated Teacher’s booklet.
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