21st Century Citizen: the online resource for Citizenship

www.bl.uk/citizenship

KS3 - KS4 (Years 7 - 11)

Citizenship, ICT, History & English

This product is published by British Library (Tel: 020 7412 7708)

This is a very interesting site and supports the new subject of Citizenship most appropriately. The designers have drawn on the vast resources of the British Library to provide many fascinating antique documents, books and maps and have presented them in a fresh and interesting way. The site manages to throw light on our past British heritage and at the same time investigate many issues of relevance to our own times. The worksheets and other tasks, which are provided in RTF, support the information very well. However, besides providing materials for this new course of study, there is much that is cross-curricular,and many History, Geography and RE teachers will be able to plunder the site for suitable teaching materials.

This is potentially a very exciting site. It will benefit greatly from users responding to the rich range of materials and ideas available and being prepared to contribute and give feedback with their own materials. There is a nice balance between contemporary information and historical resource, and there is much to recommend in the challenging and open way the site has been written. The British Library extracts are excellent - I loved the detail available in the 13th century map. Bookmark this site now! And it's free!

I took a class of mixed-ability Year 10 Geography students into one of the networked computer suites with an LSA to investigate various aspects of crime and the community. This linked to their coverage of Citizenship. Students were able to identify some reasons why the peak age for offending is 18 and began to understand the concept of 'criminal responsibility'. There was understanding of why some children are not considered responsible for criminal actions and the basic structure of the youth justice system was outlined. Issues of fairness to the victim and offender and the importance of a fair trial were discussed. Overall, the 21st Century Citizen will help any department deliver aspects of Citizenship in a much more interesting way.

The site is a wonderful resource in so many ways. In the particular application for which I used it, the site offered my class the opportunity to act as researchers and they thoroughly enjoyed the activities that they had to carry out. The content of the site is of such a high quality that it has provided a great stimulus for future discussions on this topic. This is a very impressive resource.