"Study the past if you would define the future." ~ Confucius

Teaching students about historical events can get them excited about learning. The trick is to bring history to life and make it more tangible than a textbook offers. Students need to experience history, not just read about it. One way students can get a perspective about a historical event is to create a timeline. Timelines act as graphic organizers that help learners categorize, sequence, and analyze the events and people that create that particular history. Timelines also help learners to chunk difficult language and summarize in their own words how they understand the history they read about.

Timeline Tools

Below are various free multimedia online tools that your students can use to create timelines of any historical event.

Tiki-Toki - Create multimedia timelines on the web with text, images (Flickr supported), and video (choose from YouTube or Vimeo).

Timetoast- This is embeddable in a blog or wiki and allows students to add text and images. This tool is very simple to use and allows for longer descriptions when clicked.

TimeRime - Another embeddable timeline that supports events with text, images, music, and more. Has zooming features and other cool features for educators.

Timeglider - Create multimedia timelines with text, links, and images to accompany dates and events. It has zooming features, allows embedding, and the ability to create legends.

Thinglink - This is more a multimedia poster but students can add an image of a historical event then create dates that are linked to multimedia resources.

A Few Activities and Ideas

Creating a multimedia timeline is just part of the process of bringing that historical event to life, but students can experience more while researching and collecting resources to include in their timeline. Below are a few tips and ideas to ensure your learners get the most out of the process.

Interviews

• Students can interview someone who is tied to the event. They can interview someone from a museum or a relative or conduct a Skype interview with a person located somewhere else.

Primary Resources

• Students can include video or audio excerpts of people who experienced the event. Find primary resources on sites like History.com, the Library of Congress, Scholastic, and StoryCorps audio interviews.
• Students can add primary writing excerpts and quotes to their timeline such as images or PDFs of handwritten letters, poetry, newspaper articles and diary entries. In this post, Richard Byrne lists 9 websites to find all types of primary resources.

Digital Reenactments of Events

• Students can create a digital comic of the event using Creaza.
• Students can create a talking avatar with Voki. It has a library of historical figures to choose from. Students can use their voices to make the avatar speak or type in the text.

Geography of the Events

• Students can include links to virtual tours of the event. Find a good list of historical virtual tours in this article, Teaching History with Technology: Virtual Tours.
• Students can include links to maps or images of what the area looked like when the event took place. Find historical maps here, interactive maps with timelines here, and animated historical maps here.

What other ideas do you have?