June 23, 2025
history

Tips for online teaching and evaluation with Old Bailey

Tips for online teaching and evaluation with Old Bailey

https://blog.history.ac.uk/files/2025/06/2048px-London_Central_Criminal_Court_Old_Bailey._NBY_442098.jpg

Digital archives have changed how history is taught. Among the most effective and accessible sources, Old Bailey is a search collection in about 200,000 test reports from the Central Criminal Court of London. In 1674-1913, crime, justice and the truths of the society provide a unparalleled window.

Old Bailey online is a powerful pedagogical tool that helps students develop basic skills such as sources critical, contextual analysis and digital literacy. There are numerous ways to teach history of humanities and social sciences, criminology, law or wider issues, as well as integrating this archive into your curriculum.

Below, Old Bailey online, each of the teaching strategies paired with old Bailey paired with the proposed class activities and evaluation ideas. These approaches encourage students to attract deeply with historical texts, understand the complexity of the past and become active researchers.

London, Central Criminal Court, Old Bailey, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

Direction and testing literacy

Start basic skills. Initially, there is a wide range of material available online for students who can be awesome and extreme for students. Present students to the old Bailey and some foundation and social history knowledge. Prepare students to read ‘how to read’ instruction ‘instructions’ to prepare students in primary research.

An activity for this session can be a seminar that students have a short trial, basic components and identifiable terms. Use the group work to create confidence. Students can help each other, share ideas and identify knowledge gaps.

An idea for the formative or generalization assessment is the added test extract. Students record the transcript with the comments explaining each section and provide a dictionary of research terms.

Structured thematic searches

In the trained part of this session, lead to students using filters (eg criminal categories, gender, age, history, judgment) to open samples in court. It understands how digital literacy and data formed historical narratives.

After demonstrating the filters, ask students to hold their comparative searches. For example, in 1750-1770 and 1800-1820, female theft reflects the change or sustainability of the defendants, language, judgment or witnesses.

As an assessment, ask the student to provide a short report or submission of search findings. Students should describe the search methodology, specimen should show examples and keep their findings within a broader historic.

Methodology

Give a meeting on historical research methods. Explore how historians work in court notes, the methods they used and their research questions.

This session is a continuous operation. Students can create weekly magazine entries, digital logs or blog posts that reflect their progress in a larger project. Includes reflections in unexpected findings or failed searches.

Weekly activity, then, fed a summative assessment that students learn about how research questions are developed and learn about their choice methodology and historical methods.

Quantitative history

You may want to give a session aimed at quantitative research after general view of historical methods. Use old Bailey data to teach students about long-term trends as students to change criminal priorities, such as criminal priorities or change sex priorities for prosecutors for prosecutors. Talk to the students with the old Bailey online ‘do Statistics’ guide.

Ask students to produce graphs or tables to present their findings. These can indicate the total trends of the crime or sentence they choose or enter sub-categories such as indefinite theft or demographic factors such as the sex of the suspects.

After the information is visualized, students provide a report stating that the history of the topics of the topics of the graphics said. How to connect them to a wider, social, economic or political change, how to develop a crime and punishment, how to build.

History of quality

Students of quality history teaching students to discover the practices of historical documents, court documents and individual voices, legal documents. The critical analysis of how the law intersects with social identities such as society, class and race, develop the concept of justice as a social process.

Encourage students to choose a test and investigate the depth. It develops the source criticism, especially when the empathy is engaged in historical imagination and source criticism, especially fragmented or mediator narratism.

This can lead to an evaluated business examination. This task students transformed to active historians who are critically interrogating quality evidence from passive consumers of test stories. Digital skills are an excellent way to combine historical thinking and produce fundamental, original research projects. It requires that students are engaged in relevant academic literature and module topics to context to context.

Rebuild the courtroom

In the teaching section of this session, you can explore that justice is not only a legal process, but also a spectator, court officials, or the public, or the public and the public and the public. The courtroom is not a place where justice is seen, but the place of stories, power is being negotiated and personalities are being carried out.

You can ask students to transcribe test transcripts into class performances. Ask students to determine the roles (judge, prosecutor, the suspect, witness, the judicial, judicial, judge) according to the groups. This helps to bring out the material and help students realize the emotional and rhetorical dynamics of the courtroom.

This activity can be forming or generalization assessment. Alternatively, the group’s performance can be followed by a reflective writing. Each student explains what the theater is and historically engaged in selected topics.

Critical reflection in the archive

Use online Bailey online online to include why they are noted and why we are noticed and why we can’t hear the sounds in this archive online. This critical opposite reflection deepens the concept of archive as students and partial source.

Activities can compare test transcripts with other modern records such as newspapers, applications or literature. Encourage students to think that the factors such as class, race, genital or abilities affect the record in a record.

Evaluation, ‘It is possible to hear the blessing of the defendant in the old Bailey records, for example, can a critical build?’ Students require Robert Shoemaker, Frances Dolan, Natalie Zemon Davis, Tim Stretton, Amanda Capern or Joanne Bailey.

Digital Story and Social History

Use the old Bailey online to teach a public date and digital story. Consider the importance of delivering research to a wider audience, think about the best practices, methods and ethical considerations.

Students can turn test narratives to videos, podcasts or blogs to a wider audience. This activity complies with skills in academic research areas for communication, digital media and non-specialist.

As an assessment, students reflect digital stories by discussing the research process, translator choices and balance sheets.

In general, the old Bailey is more than an online database; It is a dynamic class source that invites students to be historians. By combining digital literacy with traditional historical skills, teachers help students to detect secret complexity in the past and improve critical thinking skills. Structured tasks, open surveys, creative projects, shared learning and critical reflection, students are actively involved in various questions about justice and society. Including the old Bailey’s instructions online offers an attractive way for history to be material, relevant and inspiring.

Dr. Stefani is a teacher who is a member of the Cultures of the Prison Center in Criminology, Brown, Hull University. He is interested in critical and archive pedagogies and has extensive experience using digital sources such as Bailey online and medieval murder maps.
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/stephemmagbown.bsky.social
Website: https://hull-repoitry.worktribe.com/person/4764636/stephanie-brown
Email: S.Brown6@hull.ac.uk

Blog Author Photo: (c) Chris Lacey Photography

Banner Photo: London, Central Criminal Court, Old Bailey, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

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