New Online Resources at National Records of Scotland

The education team at National Records of Scotland (NRS) is developing new online resources to support teachers and learners in the delivery of Curriculum for Excellence and National Qualifications.

Our approach is simple and straightforward: we wish to provide content that can be adapted by teachers to support different topics, themes and areas within the Scottish curriculum at different teaching levels. Our units will offer images of original sources, transcripts and background notes.

Three new resources are available at http://www.scottisharchivesforschools.org/indexPilotResources.asp. 

Please visit the resources and, if you have time, provide answers to the following questions by emailing education@nas.gov.uk .

Content and supporting text:

• Which units did you use?

• Is sufficient context provided to enable you to make full use of the resources?

• We have chosen to make complete documents available as far as possible, believing that students should encounter the whole source rather than just selected extracts. Do you agree with this approach?

• We are piloting both topic-based (eg. Scottish Suffagettes and The Great War) and thematic units (Letters and Diaries). Do you have a preference for either presentation and, if so, why?

Style and layout on screen:

• Are you able to navigate the units to identify sources? Do you have any comments on the style of the pages?

• Can you right click and save the images, and are they of sufficient quality for you to use them both electronically and in print form?

• If you are able to test the images on a smartboard, please do so and let us know of any technical problems you encounter opening or using them.

• We provide document transcriptions as printable Rich Text Format documents (rtfs). Are you able to access this type of file or would an alternative, eg. pdf, be preferable?

Your feedback will be really useful to us in developing our online service. Thank you for your time and assistance.