“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn”.


Close your eyes. I want you to pretend for a moment that you’ve magically travelled back in time to the early 14th Century. To your left are dukes and earls feasting at magnificent banquets. To your right are lowly peasants scouring the streets for leftover food. And straight ahead is a never-ending line of plague-ridden patients waiting to see the local ‘doctor’.

 History is always a tough subject to bring to life, and even more so when a teacher is trying to transport their students back more than 700 years in time to plague-era Europe. But we had a hunch that technology might be one way to make this subject a whole lot more participatory.  With this in mind, our Creative Lab teamed up with Grumpy Sailor to help a classroom of year 8 students from Bowral ‘video conference’ with 1348, in what we called a “Hangout in History”.


We knew we’d need quite a special teacher to make an experiment like this work (“Wait, you want to video conference with the 1300s??”), so we felt very lucky to meet John Staats, Vice Principal at Bowral High School. An historical re-enactment enthusiast, his dedication to making history exciting reminded us of Benjamin Franklin’s famous maxim: “Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn”. With his class signed up for this educational experiment, we were good to go. 

 To bring medieval England to life, we took over one of Google’s conference rooms in Sydney, and placed a monk, a doctor and a widow in front of three separate webcams.  A small team of actors led by our ‘doctor’, Jack Yabsley, worked with educators to research and script an interactive 15 minute hangout, which depicted plague victims and their lives as accurately as possible. The live Hangout on Air lasted 40 minutes with the cast improvising factual responses to the students’ questions about the Black Plague. You can watch the full Hangout here and go behind-the-scenes with us here.


Our hope is that this pilot project will encourage and inspire more educators to think about how they might use free technology to connect their classroom with the world (and through time and space!), to shift their emphasis from one-way learning to a participatory model that plays to the inquisitive and playful minds of young people. Go make some history!

Posted by Tom Uglow, Creative Director of Creative Lab, Google