Monday, October 10, 2011

Creating With Digital Timelines

Digital timelines are a great way for students to illustrate past events and act as a historian to produce and create content. There are many fabulous tools available to educators that can really add to your social studies curriculum content. One great resource teachers can tap into would be your local library and museums. Students can photograph content found in their local community to connect curriculum to their world.

Students in our local elementary are studying physical and human characteristics of the local community to learn geographic concepts, map skills, and the idea of chronological events. Students are researching and working with the local museum to create an illustrated digital timeline on the history of their school. We found 5 significant events: First educators (whose pictures are in our local museum), a state basketball from a state championship game, first yearbook, rodeo band uniforms to reflect cowboy rodeo culture, and information on the actual construction of the current Elementary building built in the 1980's. Students will use their iPods to record information about these items and will produce a digital time line. This idea could be adapted to fit any American event in history such as Early American History, Civil War, WWI,Great Depression, WWII, NASA, etc.

Need a digital time line resource?

Check these out:
Dipity Digital Video Timeline
Data Driven Timeline
Timetoast
Xtimeline allows you to create widgets
Preceden: Great Simple Timeline for making simple graphs

No comments:

Post a Comment