American Revolution Timeline

It's funny. Ofttimes, I will require a lesson or activity idea for a particular topic or subject. Google will prove barren. Then, I will browse the blogs in my Google Reader and skim through the tweets in my Twitter, and within a few days, I will find something that fits my needs. This phenomenon is so recurrent that it does not surprise me anymore. I've come to expect it.

My Secondary 2 History class is beginning a unit on the revolutionary period. I wanted to provide them with an activity concerning the American Revolution. Considering the immense population of American and their consummation with their own history, I assumed that there would be a plethora of American Revolution activities online. However, my search through Google uncovered nothing worthwhile.

That was a couple days ago.

Today, in Google Reader, I found this entry, from Mr. Byrne, from Mr. Ferlazzo. Mr. Byrne introduces a great interactive time line of the American Revolution. It possesses two attributes that my students appreciate most: photographs and short segments of text.

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.

Steven Roberge's Story: OurStory.com - Capture your stories, save them permanently. via kwout

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.

TimeRime.com - Make your own timeline! via kwout

 

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.