Advice for Historic Environment Records and the new curriculum

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After the meeting at The Hive a couple of weeks ago we started thinking about what Historic Environment Records (HERs) could easily do, with little resourcing, to engage with the new curriculum.

Our director, Kim Biddulph, worked for four years in Buckinghamshire HER during a project to get it online with images digitised and attached and associated articles and resources for teachers and the community to more easily use it. You can see the results at http://ubp.buckscc.gov.uk. The teacher information is out of date, now, as teachers will be after Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age information.

ubpFor HERs that aren’t online, or don’t have associated resources for public accessibility, here are a few ideas that could be done pretty quickly and cheaply.

1. Does your region have a research framework? If so, you should have county/district resources assessments that you could share as PDFs on your website. Ideally do a precis of the resource assessment and label them with “Stone Age”, “Bronze Age” and “Iron Age” terms. These are the terms used in the curriculum, these are the terms teachers will be searching for.

2. Teachers and pupils love images. You have amazing collections, particularly of excavations and aerial photographs. Nick an explanation of aerial photography from somewhere, e.g. this one from Cornwall, and add in your own images. Create a quick image gallery on your website of relevant excavations or sites. Label them with captions that give the bare essentials that a teacher would need to use them in the classroom.

3. If you use HBSMR, and it’s online, buy the Themes module and add some of the above detail directly into the database. This allows you to link these articles directly back to the raw data on a site. Obviously, there are some costs to this option!

Any more great ideas, do post in the comments below.

1 thought on “Advice for Historic Environment Records and the new curriculum”

  1. It seems there always new maatriel that needs to be added to the curriculum. There are only so many hours in the day; if we want the different subjects to be effectively taught and not just glossed over, something has to go away for every new thing that is added. I will be sad to see cursive become a lost art, but I think that keyboarding is more useful life skill in this culture.It’s my understanding that the main reason to use cursive is speed, and with computers that’s no longer a consideration. I guess I’d rather that my kids be taught grammar and effective communication so that they aren’t the ones writing the unreadable facebook statuses! )

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