Sunday, August 30, 2009

Timelines

This is another one of those blog posts that must begin with, "I haven't posted in a long time. I've been so busy." A combination of moving and starting a new job, coupled with a lack of internet access for a week prohibited my internet contributions.

One of courses that I will be teaching this year is History. It will be a split-level class, with the junior group starting at the sedentarization of humans some 12000 years ago. The senior group will pick-up which they should have left off last year, at the Renaissance.

As with every course I teach, my objective will be to have students complete their work online as much as possible. In each of the subjects, the students will be creating a blog to host their online portfolios.

The History students, I will make them create a timeline. They will use this timeline to input information throughout the school year.

On my Diigo site, I have four timeline sites bookmarked. As usual, I looked first at the most popular site, which is OurStory.

OurStory looks like it would be good for creating a personal biography (I’ll keep it in mind for my English class), but it does not seem to serve my purposes for History.

Next, I checked out TimeRime.  TimeRime is popular; it seems to have many feature; but, after trying it out, I felt that is was a bit too complex for middle school students.

 

So, I settled on TimeGlider.  TimeGlider offers a nice balance of simplicity and functionality.  Users can insert photos into events, and embed their timeline.  Also, TimeGlider allows you to insert photos from the web; whereas, TimeRime requires users to upload photos and store them in different folders.

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