Not so very long ago, history was a very difficult subject to demonstrate in any practical sense. Yes, there were museums where you could take children to look at dusty old exhibits, and if you were lucky these might include something the children could actually relate to, such as toys. Later there began to appear ‘living’ museums such as the Black Country Museum in Dudley, where visitors could actually go inside houses and other buildings from the past and, in some cases, interact with volunteers or actors playing characters from the appropriate period.
However, visits to museums and the like are not something that is possible every week, and so much history in schools remains classroom-based. This brings us back to the original problem of involving pupils in history in a practical sense. It isn’t a naturally practical subject like science or art and design. Fortunately, increasingly over the last decade and a half, ICT has come to the rescue.
There are large numbers of history-related software packages now available for the classroom, and many of these feature the topic of the Victorians in greater or lesser detail. There are also some extremely good products around which concentrate on the Victorian era itself and, even better, on the people of that era and their lives. So let’s take a quick virtual tour around Victorian Britain… Walking around a brewing town Last year I visited the Bass Museum of Brewing in Burton-upon-Trent, Staffordshire, and among the traditional types of exhibit showing the different processes of brewing and the history of the town was a high-tech virtual tour.
This gave visitors the opportunity to ‘meet’ some characters from Victorian Burton, ask them questions about their lives and accompany them on a tour of a virtual model of the town in the year 1881. What a great idea, I thought. And this virtual tour is now available for use in the classroom. The tour is now marketed by Cambridge-Hitachi as part of a pack called Victorian Britain, which is aimed at providing motivating support for Key Stage 2 history and literacy. It has two components:
■ Virtual Burton CD-ROMs
■ Online stories on a linked website
As in the original museum version, Virtual Burton introduces various characters who will take you on a tour through the town as they go about their daily lives. The website then uses these same characters in a story-based approach to explore different perspectives of life in 1881. The software offers a faithful reconstruction of Burton-upon-Trent as it was in 1881. Over 450 buildings have been accurately computer modelled to provide a striking historical backdrop, and there are 13 characters to question and accompany on their journeys along the animated streets, from a wide range of backgrounds. The characters are based on real people found on the 1881 Census and provide answers to various questions to help children to understand what life was like for the characters in that period.