Making Source Work more Saucy!

If using Timelines with students makes my body shudder then Sources should come with a Health and Safety warning. Sources are great and teachers love them... but the moment students realise that they have to look and analyse images and text etc the shutters come down, the eyes glaze over and their brains switch off!

Don't get me wrong - at GCSE and A-Level students can appreciate sources more... and there are lots of exciting ways to stimulate KS3 students about sources using more traditional methods and more of those thinking outside of the box ideas... see Ian Dawson's website for examples of this.

So my suggestion would be to introduce students to source skills using the IWB, a good picture or illustration of a historical event and a nifty piece of free software downloadable from the website Sharedcopy.com.

Once you log on to Shared Copy and register it allows you to drag and drop a little widget onto your toolbar called sharedcopy. 

Once you have a website, diagram, PPT or even a word document on your screen you click on the icon on your toolbar and a smaller toolbar loads up with some tools that will allow you to do different annotational aspects on your chosen document. These annotations can be saved to your account.


Below is an example of how I used it to add annotations to a diagram of the Battle of Hastings.

It's just a different way for you to broach the idea of sources in the classroom. It could be used as a group via the IWB. It could be used individually on computers. It could be URL linked via the school VLE so that students can add the widget at home and complete a task for homework.


There are lots of ways in which it could be used... as the old saying goes 'what can be imagined can be achieved but you must dare to dream'... oh hang on that was Scully to Mulder in an X-Files episode... oh well it still works in this case!


Saucing up source work via Web 2.0 - happy blogging!