How will your students use this Atlas of World History?

As the atlas is built to cover more and more of the world's history, it will be able to be used with and by your students in the following ways:

1. As a resource for indvidual free research
This atlas will allow students to gain an overview of an historical topic and place it in its broader context quickly and easily. The accompanying essays will allow them to delve a little deeper into key topics (i.e. those most likely to be covered by history curricula). In this Learning Centre we will suggest lines of research which may be fruitful

2.As a resource for targetted investigation
Used in this way, students, either individually or in groups, are set to answer specific questions about a topic (we will be supplying suggested questions).

3.As a whole class presentation
The maps are of high quality and can be used with whiteboards. We will supply lesson plans based on such presentations.

4.Using the prepared classroom activities
As stated above, we will be putting decision-making activities and other classroom resources in this Learning Centre, designed to enrich the study of key topics.

Meanwhile for your consideration:

How will this Atlas of World History benefit your students?

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!