First Post!

This is a blog about History teaching and education in general.

I'm not sure what will go here but I expect it will be mostly experimental.

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Timeline of Inter-War Years and Dictatorships Inspired, as ever by the work of  @worcesterjonny,  and using one of his files as a template, I knocked this Timeline together to cover the Interwar years and the dictators of the 1920s and 1930s. I think it should be useful for display purposes if you can find a printer which can use A2 pages and also for analysis (give an A3 version to your students!). I hope to use it with my IB History students (Paper 3, Europe Topics 14 & 15), and it should be useful for a variety of GCSE courses too. The PDF can be found here The Editable Publisher file can be found here (if you want to do your own version)
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Teaching in Teams & Class Notebook

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My school rolled out Microsoft Teams to us in Summer 2018, and gave teachers the choice how far to use the new technology. All students were to be given a "Surface" laptop, but otherwise teachers were left to decide how far to adopt the new technology for the first year. Previously we had a "bring your own device" policy which  meant that some students worked on a laptop, but most had files with paper and KS3 had exercise books. Some staff (me included) were using Google Classroom, but there was no College-wide tech policy.  This seemed like progress. I decided to fully embrace the challenge so that all of my lessons would be done via Teams with all class work distributed via the Class Notebook. My rationale was that students would otherwise end up having some work on the virtual environment and some on paper in a folder or stuck into an exercise book; I wanted everything in one place. I also wanted to be working in one way for all my classes.  Needless to say, whe
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Knowledge revision quizzes

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I don't honestly remember who inspired this format - but whoever you are on the EduTwitterverse, thanks! This was an attempt to have some quiz-style questions which covered most of the CIE IGCSE History course. Other GCSE courses do some similar topics, and some do different ones; I am sharing this here if you wish to make your own. I have used these questions as lesson starters or as a short test to consolidate a unit. This is partly inspired by the excellent work of Kate Jones and her work on "Retrieval Practice"; I'll write more about this in a future blog post, but in sum the idea is this: In order to get students to fully understand a topic its details have to be stored in long term memory, and be connected to existing knowledge. This is achieved by "calling to mind" the information previously taught and using this information in some way; new information is thus moved from the smaller working memory and stored in the long-term memory. Low-stakes qu
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