xtimeline

I happened across this web site yesterday in my feed travels.  It’s a relatively new site that is geared toward making timelines. xtimeline allows you to make timelines for anything.

This started me thinking about the uses in education.  History is a given, right?  I mean, I have a few history classes that I’m working on and I can imagine a faculty member either using this or having her students use it to make a relative timeline to a paper or to what they think is the important information in the class.  What amazing feedback that could offer.

But imagine that you’re a literature teacher (ahem, miss ashley, are you paying attention???).  Say you’re teaching Pride and Prejudice.  Well, we have two obvious things here (probably many more now that I really start to think about it).  We have the timeline of the book itself.  Can we track the characters and what they are doing, with whom and when?  Also, we can look at Austen’s life and track where she was when she wrote it and where she lived, traveled, etc. while this book was being written, published, promoted, etc.  But we could also track world happenings at the time that might have influenced Austen – what other books were published, what societal happenings occurred, what the weather was like, etc.  We could track the literary criticisms of P&P over time and how those changed according to time periods, social influences, and political environments.  This could get students thinking outside the box, which is really good when critical thinking is a new concept to them.

Physics, chemistry, geology, business admin, psychology — I can see this being a useful tool in any of those area.  Getting outside of “traditional” education (those darned liberal arts), I could see this being used in forestry, recreational education, or even dental hygiene classes (track the progress of patients over time).

We use timelines in a lot of our classes.  Typically an instructor will request a timeline to be developed and we do so according to their request.  But what if the power was put back into the students’ hands and they created timelines to show what they are learning in the classroom?  This is the kind of assessment tool that could be fun and interesting — and educational.

This is not a paid advertisement.  I just found the site and thought it was cool and wanted to share it with my readers.