This technology is a useful tool to help primary students make connections to past events and places. Create historical scenarios, animate events and communicate using History in Motion.

While timelines play a vital role in organising and representing historical time, primary aged children make sense of a timeline if they can make connections to their prior knowledge. 

Design learning  activities that involve making comparisons between then and now. Start with making connections with the material or social aspects of life (e.g. school, clothes, toys, transport) in the past.

According to Levstik and Barton (2005), understanding historical time involves:

1. being able to order moments in time
2. being able to match moments in time to specific dates

Research shows that children are better at sequencing historical periods (e.g. convict era, colonial Australia) than assigning dates or names to those periods. Dates often don't allow students to visualise

the time being referred to. As such, teachers can facilitate learning by helping students visualise images of history with the corresponding dates. Help students make distinctions between broad categories of time (close to now, a long time ago, in the 1800s etc).

There are many affordances for QR codes in history. Pose an historical inquiry question and get students to gather clues (evidence) using primary sources embedded with a QR code at a museum, local community, school etc. Or, get primary students to create their own QR codes for artefacts. This could engage students in historical inquiry and the analysis and use of primary and secondary sources.

How would a famous person in history use instagram?

The free app, Clarisketch can be used by primary students when they are examining and analysing historical artefacts. The app allows users to take a picture, highlight the details, comment then share with others via email, facebook or google plus.

Digital stories can mirror the discipline of history through the process and product of what and how they are created.