In the course of teaching history/Social Studies, it seems that nearly every year I have to teach the kids how World War I got started and how the Schlieffen Plan kicked in. It’s a fairly complex sequence of events, and I always seem to lose at least a couple of them even though my diagrams on the board have been getting clearer and clearer each time. Last week I wondered to myself whether it would help the kids if they could play my diagram back for themselves, one step at a time.

I don’t have a smart board that can record all my doodles, so I took pictures of my diagrams as I made them, put them in a powerpoint and uploaded them. I need to work on the contrast on the white board I used (the glare caused problems), but it wasn’t a bad first attempt. The concept is worth trying again. The execution needs a bit of work.