News - Summer 2007

Focus On Film

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.

• Investigate different aspects of film as evidence with our specially developed teaching activities for PC and interactive whiteboard
• View our clips ranging from reconstructions of earlier periods in history to original footage of the 20th Century
• Use our online editing tool to explore the meaning of film

Award Winning 'Prisoner 4099'

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 Relevant to KS3 Victorian Britain, the play and historical documents that shaped the project also offer cross-curricular links to Citizenship and English.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.

Perceptions of Haig

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.

Helen Ward manages the East Midlands Strategic Commissioning programme, a major initiative to develop museum and archive education funded by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). Formerly a teacher, Helen has experience of teaching History, Geography, and Religious Studies across the 11-18 age range.

The Learning Curve has played an important role in putting archive education on the map. Indeed it inspired my first project at MLA East Midlands, the Emsource websitelaunched in September 2003, which opens up archive resources from the East Midlands to teachers and learners.

Archives enable students to study the past through a ‘local lens’. For this reason Focus on the Census continues to be a firm favourite of mine. By bringing together census returns, maps and old photographs it provides an excellent introduction to using documents and equips students with skills to conduct a study of their own locality. The big attraction of the Learning Curve however, is access to nationally important archives. The Domesday Book, Guy Fawkes’ papers, Shakespeare’s financial accounts and government documents relating to the Cold War are just some of the gems available.

Archive materials connect us to real people and events from the past, providing a sound basis for creative learning. Prisoner 4099, a recent National Archives project is a great example of this. It has involved a group of young people using documents to research, write and perform a play about the experience of William Towers, a twelve year old boy convicted of stealing two rabbits in 1872 and sent to Wandsworth Prison. As part of the project, students also visited National Centre for Citizenship and Law in Nottingham, highlighting the complimentary nature of archive and museum learning.