The Anzac Portal — a modern approach to learning about our military history

Our website audience is diverse, but during school terms it includes a very high proportion of teachers and students in Australian schools.

The Anzac Portal has a library of resources. It includes all the educational materials we designed for primary and secondary schools. We’ve digitised all printed books, classroom guides and posters we’ve sent to every school in Australia. Online, some of our most popular resources relate to the Australian Curriculum. These include:

• Here They Come picture book, which we’ve also released as a digibook for smartboards
• We Remember Anzac workbooks for primary and secondary
• Women in War, which we’ve revised as Australian Women in War: Service, Courage and Care
• Why We Remember slide deck for primary teachers.

In time for the new school year, we published an updated version of a very popular web page, The Anzac Legend. We worked with a secondary school teacher and a historian to review and respond to all the user feedback we have received from students and teachers.

The web page now presents a more balanced and modern approach to the story, with loads of links to great source material that teachers can cover in the classroom. We hope it will help young Australians uncover the origins of the Anzac legend, what it means to us today and its relevance for the future.

While it’s not on our Anzac Portal, we’ve also got some education resources for our Nominal Rolls, including an activity guide for teachers and parents and an activity sheet. With the activity guide, students will work through the process used to access and search for veterans using the DVA Nominal Rolls. Meanwhile, the activity sheet aims to assist in building student understanding and appreciation of the concept of commemoration and to broaden knowledge of Australia’s wartime experiences.