TimeMaps Atlas of World History : How this atlas will benefit your students

Learning Centre: English and Welsh Schools

The TimeMaps Atlas of World History is a free online resource which will eventually cover all the world's history.

As such, it will be of great benefit in supporting secondary school teachers as they introduce the new KS3 history curriculum, from September 2008.

This curriculum will be designed specifically to expose children to a broader experience of history than has been the case with the old one.

In this Learning Centre we will be putting up teaching notes and learning resources which will specifically address the various themes covered by the new curriculum.

We very much hope that teachers will encourage their students to use this free online resource, especially once we have built it to cover more of the world's 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!