User:Annielogue/ActiveHistory

ActiveHistory is a history teaching and learning website created, maintained and updated by history teacher Russel Tarr. Since its beginnings, when Tarr taught at Wolverhampton Grammar School in the late 1990s it has made free and paid-for online content available, in the form of games, worksheets and lesson plans for history teaching aimed at secondary history students and teachers.

Features
According to the website, it provides "entertaining, educational award-winning interactive simulations, decision-making games, self-marking quizzes, high-quality worksheets and detailed lesson plans for teachers and students."

Head2Head interviews
This feature, added to the site in 2001, allows users to ask questions in natural language "to" a number of historical characters and receive answers from them. By 2002 the site offered Henry VIII of England and Adolf Hitler; by 2013 William the Conqueror, Joseph Stalin, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Dr Fox, the Medicine Through Time Expert had been added. The feature won first prize in the Becta/Guardian UK Education Web Site Awards 2002 in the Secondary Education category. and has been popular since, despite some claims that in the case of Adolph Hitler the feature trivialized or promoted Nazism.

Reviews
Reviews of the site have been generally very favourable. Roger Frost in The Sunday Times praised it, writing, "To see teaching creativity bubble onto the internet, and regain any lost joy for school, take a trip to Active History. Pick your year and topic, and discover an enjoyable, intensely hands-on learning environment." Becky Hewlitt, writing the Times Educational Supplement, reviewing websites that offer a wide range of learning activities was of the opinion that, "If the Queen taught history then Russel Tarr would be a knight of the realm. His superb site has saved me thousands of hours of planning and is a constant source of innovative and exciting ideas."

Controversy
The Times criticised it as "the trendy teaching methods that replace facts with 'activities'".