Video Ideas

Home FAQ Contact Terms & Conditions About Us © 2010 Video History Today

Ideas: Some I prepared earlier

Video History Today was created to provide teachers and students with the raw materials to create video essays.

Below are some examples of video essays produced by Video History Today which show some simple ideas using music an commentary. Raw clips from the Video History Today archive have been used and edited using the free Windows Moviemaker software.

Remember that the aim of producing video essays is not to become an Academy Award winner; the aim is to enhance the learning experience, both in the production of the essay (technical skills, in a team project learning team skills, thinking about the story to be told) and in the sharing with the peer group. In time, a school/college can develop a range of video essays for future generations of students.

World War One

The Holocaust

D-Day and Normandy 1944

American Civil War

Other videos

Ultimately, the Video History Today Video Collections take the student to where history happened, allows them to relate to a real location and hopefully improve their ability to absorb world events by relating to where it really happened.

The Holocaust (Compare the memorials to the Holocaust at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen Belsen, Dachau, Plaszow, Sachsenhausen. Who built them? Why?)
D Day & Operation Overlord (What happened on ‘The Longest Day’? Where did your soldiers land and what did they do? See how the Allies commemorate their fallen. )
American Civil War (What was the most important action of the American Civil War? If Stonewall Jackson had not died at Gettysburg, the Gettysburg Address would not exist. Discuss. Would the outcome of the Civil War have been different?).
Analyse the events of the Holocaust starting with the meeting that decided on the Final Solution to the 'Jewish problem' in Central Europe (the Wannsee Villa in Berlin) to the horrors of Plaszow, Auschwitz and Birkenau.
Create a video essay showing where British and Canadian Soldiers went ‘over the top’ on 1st July 1916 on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.
Use the numerous headstones from a World War One cemetery as the basis of a project tracking the history of a local soldier or a regiment.

Some more ideas