Explore The Past Online

I spotted this interesting tool this morning. Take Me Back To is a search engine which can locate information from a particular day in history.  It searches for a range of things from the date you enter, from popular songs and movies on that day, to news, fashion styles and advertisements.

All you have to do is type in a date and click on 'Go' and it will generate your results.

You can try it from here.

Powered by TakeMeBack.to

This is potentially a great tool to use with students.

• You could show results and see if they can guess the year / date
• You can get students to research a date and make past tense sentences about it.
• You can get students to find out what was happening on the day they were born.
• You can get students to compare results from two different decades.

There are a few things you need to be careful about though

• The search doesn't work so well when you tart going further back than the 60s
• In the section that shows magazine covers, it sometimes shows the cover of Playboy magazine and students could possibly click through to the site from there, so be careful about letting younger learners or teens access the site.

Despite the potential problems, I still think Take Me Back To is a really interesting site to generate materials for language work in the classroom.

I hope you find it useful.

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 Best

Nik Peachey