From Empire to Commonwealth - A selection of useful links for self-study when preparing a presentation

This website give you a lot of information of the history of the British Empire, divided into categories such as Biographies | Timelines | Discussion | Map Room | Armed Forces | Art and Culture | Science and Technology. I also has a glossary and useful links. The "Pap Room" give you a map of each country of the Empire and tells you when it became part of it.

This is the official website of the Commonwealth.

This is mainly for teachers and has quite a few useful resources.

The World Factbook gives you detailed profiles of all the countries in the world. This is useful for reference but should not be the basis of your presentation.

Now that you've got the basics, choose your presentation topic. It should, in most cases, not be a topic such as "India" or any other large country.

Your presentation could only be very superficial and - boring.

• Focus instead on one aspect of the country. If it's India, even choosing "The religions of India" is too wide a topic. Focus instead on Buddhism in India, Jainism in India or Sikhism in India.
  
  
• Make sure you make use of the visual material that is available on the WWW. (See here for Sihism .)
  
  
• Instead of "Minorities in the USA" choose, perhaps, "Sikhs in California".) Here are some maps to start you off.
  
  
• Here is a worksheet in German that helps you prepare your search on the WWW. You should fill some of it in before you start your search and complete it with terms and phrases from the results of your search.
  
  
• It is, of course, not always easy to know the right words for your search before you have started searching. You could use Microsoft's Encarta to give you some ideas. Example for the search Sikh. You should collect these words for further search. For more words in German, take a look at Wissen.de.
  
  
• But for a presentation in English you will need English words. Go to Encyclopedia.com, enter your main keyword and look at the results. Here you have an example for Sikh. Or try Questia, the world's largest online library. Again, collect some of the main words and phrases. You might have to look them up in a dictionary. A good German/English online dictionary is this one. A good English dictionary is this one, which also give you links to useful sites.