The Industrial Revolution, taught nine ways.

Year 8 have compared Bradford's crowded, smoky streets with Saltaire, the village Titus Salt built beside his new mill a few miles away, which opened in 1853. Each student designs a one-page notice, dated 1872, in which the mill invites Bradford workers to move there. It must use five accurate features from the lesson's fact sheet, chosen from houses with their own water supply, gas and outside privy, the wash-houses and baths, the school, the hospital, the almshouses, the institute with its library and the park by the River Aire, and it must state one rule honestly: Salt allowed no public house in the village. Students work in Canva for Education on class accounts, starting from a blank page with text boxes, lines and a border, and no templates, stock images or sharing. In the last ten minutes each student writes in their book who Salt's rules suited and who they did not. The teacher marks the notices after the lesson against the checklist the department used when this notice was lettered by hand: five accurate features, one rule and language that fits 1872.

Tools: Canva Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Over two lessons, Year 8 explain why the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, opened on 15 September 1830, was so hard to build. In groups of three on school accounts, students create a Google Earth project with six placemarks along the 31-mile line: the Olive Mount cutting, hacked through sandstone on the way out of Liverpool; Rainhill, where the 1829 trials chose the Rocket; the nine-arch Sankey Viaduct; Parkside, where William Huskisson MP was fatally injured on the opening day; Chat Moss, the bog the track was floated across on hurdles and brushwood; and Liverpool Road station in Manchester. For each placemark the group sets the view that shows the feature most clearly and writes a caption from the source pack: the obstacle or event, the solution and what survives today. Groups pair up, click through each other's projects in order and name one caption that needs more evidence, which its authors rewrite. The teacher shows two projects on the board and the class argues which obstacle came closest to stopping the line.

Tools: Google Earth Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Over two lessons a week apart, Year 8 pairs each take one household from the town's 1851 census Sheet and write a 150-word account of it: who lived there, what their ages, occupations and birthplaces suggest, and one thing the census cannot tell them. The teacher has arranged for volunteers from the town's family history society, most of whom now live elsewhere in the country or abroad and could not come into school, to read the accounts on a private Padlet that the teacher runs. The board has one column for each household, comments are switched off and author names are hidden. Pairs post their account in their household's column, the volunteers add their replies as posts in the same column, and every post waits for the teacher's approval before it appears. During the week the volunteers reply with what their records hold and the class's source does not: the same family in the 1841 or 1861 census, a burial register entry, a line from a trade directory, or a correction to an occupation the pair misread. In the second lesson pairs read the approved replies, rewrite their account to take in the new evidence, and add a sentence on how it changed their view of the household. The class ends by asking which of the textbook's claims about industrial towns its households now support.

Tools: Padlet Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 8 are studying living conditions in industrial towns, and the source is John Leech's cartoon 'A Court for King Cholera', printed in Punch in 1852, between the cholera epidemics of 1848 to 1849 and 1853 to 1854. The teacher sets a Microsoft Form with the cartoon at the top and six long-answer questions below it. The first three ask what students can see: the crowd packed into a narrow court, the heap of refuse in the foreground, the lodging-house signs. The last three ask what they can infer: why the title calls cholera a king and this court his, who read Punch, and what the cartoonist wanted those readers to demand. Students type their answers on their own device while the teacher circulates and asks for the detail behind an inference. The Form does no marking; the teacher reads the answers after the lesson, as the exercise books were read before, and opens the next lesson with two strong answers to question six.

Tools: Microsoft Forms Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 8 have read the main terms of the 1833 Factory Act: no child under nine in a textile mill other than a silk mill, no more than nine hours a day for children aged nine to twelve, no more than twelve for those aged thirteen to seventeen, no night work for anyone under eighteen and two hours of schooling a day for the children. The teacher runs a ten-question Wayground quiz in which each question is a case an inspector might meet in 1840: a boy of eleven working twelve hours in a cotton mill, a fifteen-year-old on the night shift in a woollen mill, a girl of eight in a silk mill, a boy of twelve hauling coal underground, a woman of thirty working fourteen hours in a cotton mill. Students choose against the Act, allowed by the Act, or outside the Act because it is not a textile mill, and Wayground tells them at once whether they were right. The teacher watches the report and stops to reteach the two cases most students got wrong. Students finish by writing why four inspectors, and no birth certificates for children born before 1837, made even clear cases hard to prove.

Tools: Wayground (formerly Quizizz) Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

The textbook makes general claims about industrial towns, and Year 8 test them against their own. Before the lesson the teacher has loaded a Google Sheet with the 1851 census for the whole township, about 6,000 people, from FreeCEN's free transcription where it covers the town or from the local family history society: one row each, with street, household number, name, relationship to the head, age, sex, occupation and birthplace, as the enumerator recorded them. Each pair gets its own copy and one claim to test: that children under ten worked, that most adults had moved in from somewhere else, that houses were overcrowded, or that married women went out to work. Pairs filter and sort the columns and count the rows that match. Each pair then puts a question of its own to the data that its first count raised, such as whether the child workers lived in households born outside the county, or which streets held the most lodgers. Pairs report both counts with one household as an example, the class decides which claims hold for its town, and students write a verdict in their books.

Tools: Google Sheets Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 8 know that the first cotton mills stood beside fast rivers, and today they find out what freed them. The teacher talks through a slide deck: Thomas Newcomen's engine of 1712, pumping water out of a coal mine near Dudley and burning so much coal that it was little use away from a pit; James Watt, an instrument maker at the University of Glasgow, repairing a model Newcomen engine in the 1760s and seeing that cooling the cylinder on every stroke wasted most of the heat; his separate condenser, patented in 1769; his partnership with Matthew Boulton in Birmingham from 1775; and the 1781 patent for turning the piston's stroke into rotary motion that could drive machinery. Students copy a table from the board into their books, with columns for engine, problem, fix and what it could now do, and fill it in as the story goes. The lesson ends with a written answer: why could a mill owner in 1800 build in the middle of Manchester instead of beside a river?

Tools: PowerPoint Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 8 have read that mill children worked as piecers and scavengers, but the textbook's 1835 engraving of a mule room shows the machine standing still. On the board the teacher plays a three-minute museum film from YouTube of a restored spinning mule at work: the carriage, carrying hundreds of spindles, rolls out about a metre and a half, drawing and twisting the threads, then runs back in as the yarn winds on, several times a minute, with the noise of the room on the soundtrack. The teacher plays it through once, then again at quarter speed using YouTube's playback setting, stopping it with the carriage fully out to ask where a child would stand to join a snapped thread, and how long a scavenger had to sweep up the cotton fluff underneath before the carriage came back. Students sketch the mule from above in their books, mark the piecer's and scavenger's positions and the carriage's path, and write three sentences on why mill owners gave these jobs to children and what made them dangerous.

Tools: YouTube Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 8 are studying why the factory out-produced the home workshop, and what that did to work. For a twenty-minute shift the class makes eight-page booklets from A4 sheets: half the tables as craft workers who each fold, staple, trim, number and rule every booklet themselves, the rest as lines of five in which each student does one step and passes the work on. Everyone is at a station, so nobody is free to observe. A school tablet on a tall stand looks down on one craft table and one line, framed to show hands, work and a countdown timer but no faces, and records in time-lapse; waiting booklets lie in a row beside each station so they can be counted from above. The teacher plays the shift back in under a minute, then again, pausing at every two-minute mark while students record the queue at each station and the number of idle hands. They plot the queue at the slowest station, hear Adam Smith's 1776 account of ten men making upwards of 48,000 pins a day, and write what the line gained and what its workers lost. The footage is deleted after the lesson.

Tools: Built-in camera (slow motion and time-lapse) Nine ideas for your own version in Generate