Learning Centre: Home Schoolers
The TimeMaps Atlas of World History is a free online tool which will enrich your students’ experience of history, and will greatly contribute towards their knowledge and understanding of the historical topics they are covering.At the moment this atlas is in its early stages of being built. It so far only covers the Ancient World in any depth at all, and even here there is plenty of more content waiting to go in.
This area of the Learning Centre is not “open for business” yet, but if you are a home-schooler, please read on.
We have been very much encouraged by the interest shown in our project by a small group of home-schoolers in the US.
Apparently home-schoolers (in the US at any rate) can follow their own history curricula. This gives them the opportunity to put emphasis as and where they see fit.
With this is mind, we have been encouraged to start developing some guidelines for using the Atlas of World History in teaching world history. We hope to develop this into a complete, self-contained course on World History.
We will be posting these up shortly, and will then be asking home-schoolers to send us their comments and suggestions.
In the meantime, do use this free online resource with your students. We believe it will truly add to their understanding of the past.
Why Use the Atlas of World History?
We believe that it will offer important benefits for history students:
1. It will give them the “Big Picture”, which will give meaning and context to the topics they study. By seeing how the different civilizations, empires and nations fit into the broader context of world history, students will see clearly how they relate to one another, chronologically and geographically.
2. Using the maps will give them an understanding of “place”, crucial to the most rudimentary understanding of a topic but often hard for students to grasp.
3. The maps and their accompanying texts will offer an excellent starting point for the study of a subject, designed as they are to provide a broad overview.
4. Using the maps will greatly enhance a student’s understanding of “what happened where, when” – in other words, seeing how historical episodes and events unfold over time. This is often difficult to convey with text but graphically illustrated with maps.
5. Students will have access to the history of places and civilizations which may not be covered by the curricula on offer. This may be of particular importance to those whose families come from parts of he world left out of the curriculum they are following, but will be of interest and benefit to all students.
6. Much of the information presented in the atlas will be quite new – not only to the students but quite possibly also to you, their teachers. This atlas gives teachers as well as students the access they need to broaden their knowledge.
7. A breadth of knowledge of the history of all regions of the world is an increasingly important attribute of full citizenship in the modern world.
8. Most importantly of all, we believe that students – and hopefully teachers too - will find the information presented in the atlas fascinating.
At the moment the atlas covers only the ancient world in any depth – and even here there are many more maps, diagrams and articles to go in. As the coverage expands, the above aims will be increasingly achieved. The atlas is being constructed with these aims very much in view. Please bear with us!
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