Moving Along

Free Technology for Teachers had a post a while back about 3 timeline tools.  I decided to try them out because I want to ahve my students reate timeines in the course I am teaching this summer.

I looked at Timetoast, and liked it because if its simplicity.  However, I didn’t like the fact that I had to put in a month and day for al entries.  That lack of flexibility made me less than happy.  But it still gets high praise for ease of use. Here is my Timetoast timeline.

Mnemograph is now TimeGlider. It was easy to use and let me only show the year of events.  It demands a description for each event, though. And I can’t always figure out how to get to the beginning of the timeline.  Here is my timeline done there.

XTimeline is, I think, my favorite.  It is more linear in the way you work on it.  You can see the events you have added in list form and can even print it out in a list.  Here is my timeline there.

I am not sure that any of these are exactly what I want.  On a couple of occasions, students will be creating timelines based on the reading they have done.  It isn’t going to be a very extensive number of events they have to track, but I wanted them to work with the information in the text, and a timeline seemed the most appropriate first way to do that.

I could be happy with students doing a list, I guess, and then they wouldn’t need a timeline tool.  But I like the idea of using the tool.   Any suggestions?