Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

Making timelines can be a useful learning activity for all students, including English Language Learners. I actually think students working in small groups to create a big timeline poster is a better overall learning experience. However, I can see the development of online timelines could be a good project in some situations — for example, in sharing information with others around the world in our International Sisters Classes Project.

There are many online timeline tools out there. But I’ve only found very few — three, in fact — that are easily accessible to English Language Learners and non-tech-savvy students and teachers, free, and allow users to grab images off the web to add to their final product.

All three seem very similar. At least, I haven’t found much difference between them, but perhaps I’m missing something.

My picks for The Best Tools For Making Online Timelines are:

CircaVie (unfortunately, it appears that this tool is shutting down)

Xtimeline

Dipity

Russell Stannard, the man behind Teacher Training Videos, has come-out with a  screencast on using XTimeline.

I wrote about Capzles about a year ago, and said it looked like a neat tool to make timelines, but since they didn’t allow you to grab images off the Web I didn’t think it was particularly useful for my students.  I just went back to visit the Capzles site, and was pleased to find that they had added that ability — along with other features.  Because of these changes, I’ve added Capzles to this list.

You can find links to these three applications, as well as to the other timeline tools that didn’t make this list, on my website under Student Timelines.

If you found this list helpful, you might want to see the other over-ninety ones, too.

You might also want to consider subscribing to this blog for free.

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