A moving window technique for the finite element time domain (FETD) method is developed to simulate the propagation of electromagnetic waves induced by the transit of a charged particle beam inside large and long struc- tures. The window moving along with the beam in the computational domain adopts high-order finite-element basis functions through p refinement and/or a high-resolution mesh through h refinement so that a sufficient accuracy is attained with substantially reduced computational costs. Algorithms to transfer discretized fields from one mesh to another, which are the key to implementing a moving window in a finite-element unstructured mesh, are presented. Numerical experiments are carried out using the moving window technique to compute short-range wakefields in long accelerator structures. The results are compared with those obtained from the normal FETD method and the advantages of using the moving window technique are discussed. Show Partial Abstract