How can 'bog standard' ICT help history learning and teaching?

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Introduction

Imagine that you are an enthusiastic and dedicated history teacher (go on, you can imagine that), and for years you've been passing yourself off as an expert on teaching and learning using ICT.  Your school has just bought a set of 17 computers for your classroom and the head keeps mentioning how much he'd like to come and observe "a couple of lessons" to see you "work your magic with them".

The truth is that you've used PCs quite a lot in teaching - but mostly to design worksheets and make the odd video to keep students amused.   You're just beginning to realise that you have not really begun to think about what it means for history students to use computers to help their learning of history. 

It is now Monday morning,  8.15 am.  Your pigeon hole is crammed with notes from the head of year 11 about missing library books borrowed by members of your form sometime in year 7, and never returned.  You spread the notes out on the desk in the history office.  In horror, you spot a "yellow" sticking out from the bottom of the pile.  A few words in the head's spidery writing are visible.   

"Good news" he writes, "conference at House of Lords been cancelled.  I'll be able to come and watch your year 9 set tomorrow - can't wait to see what you've been getting them to do on the computers, and to have a chat about how we can 'cascade' your good practice accross the school".  You sink onto the office chair, forgetting that it only has three wheels instead of four, and slither gracefully to the floor, still clutching the "yellow".  

This is the scheme was also written for our recent Key Stage re-write. This unit is designed to explore the impact of different protest movements, from the Peterloo massacre, through the chartists to the suffragettes.  Along the way students will also explore the nature of democracy in the 19th Century, and compare it with modern democracy. 

Students should understand that different groups had different views, aims and tactics in reforming (or conserving ) the predominant system of voting.  They will be asked to come to a judgement as to the effectiveness of the different groups. 

This is the scheme I wrote for our recent Key Stage re-write.  It's designed to provide an overview - it covers the Tudors and Stuarts in one half term, to allow the students in the next half term to cover several depth studies. 

This is quite a big download (8 and a half meg in total), as it contains images, smartboard notebook files as well as worksheets. I've borrowed at least one worksheet from the brilliant www.schoolhistory.co.uk.  Because of this, I've done the download in three sections.

Please let me know, if you use this scheme, or any bit of it, how you get on with it.  It came in for a bit of a critical bashing here at LHS, as it was felt to be too complicated for lower attaining students.  I'd love to know if any one else tries it out.

This is a page of resources and teaching ideas for teaching the AS Italian Unification Course for OCR.

First, there's a short crossword puzzle designed to re-cap an introduction about Cavour.

Cavour Comes to Power

On a similar topic, using bits cut out of Stiles' book on Italian Unification I set up a homework activity to write a newspaper article on Cavour.