Time for Timelines

For my second voyage into examining digital text and now other digital resources, I decided to look into World History.  I have been using some online timeline creators in my online and face to face classes and wanted to share these resources in a meaningful way.

When I began to look into World History digital text, I was inspired by 2 of my former students who I saw recently over break and we were talking about their special interest - Medieval History.  As we discussed the subject, I reminded them of a timeline project that they had to complete in their world history class their freshman year of high school, both students struggled with the project in different ways.  One student had an encyclopedic knowledge of history, but had great difficulty expressing himself in writing and with fine motor skills.  The other student had reading difficulties, but if he was able to listen to text - he could understand it with ease.  As I talked with these two young men, I realized that with the digital resources I have at my fingertips today, they could have completed the assignment and received much more of an educational benefit from it.

The first resources I want to share are online timeline creators.  The wonderful website Technology 4 Teachers recently posted

Six Multimedia Timeline Creation Tools for Students which you can access at:

http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2012/10/six-multimedia-timeline-creation-tools.html#.UUEKLRmhDHs

Each of these tools offers a way to create timelines that is creative and user-friendly.

The second resource is the World History Project at:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/World_History

This wiki has a large amount of amazing texts on World History.

In my next blog - I will take you through each of the 6 timeline applications and some of the text from The World History Project that I feel are particularly strong.