The other day I received an email from my son's teacher announcing that he had an upcoming assignment that would count as a test grade. Here is the assignment:
Students will be in groups of 3 and are required to choose two important dates and events per chapter. One cardboard poster board per group, and students must be creative with their timeline and going way out there by adding pop ups, cool items and pictures that relate to their event. Students will present to the class.
The teachers at this particular campus require students to use poster board for all kinds of assignments. I am tired of these assignments because I don't even know what the teacher means by "pop ups" and "cool items." I decided to email the teacher and ask if my son's group could use an online timeline to do their project. After 3 emails he agreed that that would be acceptable. Once he agreed, I had to find a good online timeline tool. I found one at TimeToast. It allows the student to add time spans and events. In this case it was possible to add a time span for each of three units in the textbook that covered these 13 chapters. The students could then add events including images, text, and links to Web sites that provided much more detail for their presentation and future study.
Here is an example of how technology integration deepens the student's understanding of a subject. Instead of just finding events in the textbook and adding them to a poster board timeline, I was requiring students to find Websites that contained information about the event. The activity of finding the web sites meant that the students were going to have to read a lot more about the events than could ever be contained in an American history textbook. Students would then have to evaluate the validity of each web site. Also as part of the activity, I suggested that the students should give a reason for each of the events that they chose. This forced them to evaluate the significance of each event.
What I thought was particularly effective was that once the timeline had been created online, students in the entire class would have access to a study guide for all three units.
Here is a sample of what can be done.
