Knight Lab Timeline Project

Northwestern University has come out with this amazing timeline application called Timeline JS, or Knight Lab Timeline as I refer to it.  Northwestern has this "Knight Lab" that "advances news media innovation and education.  Developing ideas from experimentation through adoption, the Lab makes technology that aims to help make information meaningful and promotes quality storytelling on the Internet."

After I came across Knight Lab's timeline, I immediately wanted my Advanced Computer Application students to dabble in it and create their own interactive (and beautifully looking!) timelines.

After a few requirements from me (at least 20 events, must have a start date, must have multi-sentence text accompanying the event, must have a media item and credit, etc...), students headed over to http://timeline.knightlab.com/ and grabbed the Google Spreadsheet template that they would then use to build their timeline.  This is a feature I really loved--that the entire timeline was built using a Google Doc!!  How cool is that?!!  Hello auto-save, and syncing with Google Drive!

The goal was to have students embed their timelines on their Google Sites they created earlier in the semester, but that was one hiccup of the Timeline's embed feature: it wouldn't allow for embedding on Google Sites (which I actually think is on Google's end, not Knight Lab's).  I did find a work around to this, but it was super complicated and wayyyyy more steps than I wanted to roll out, so instead I just had students share their timeline preview links with me, and that worked just fine!

I wanted to share a few of these timelines my students made.  They got to choose what person/idea/event they were going to document on a timeline, so their timelines are very varied, yet all unique and well-created.  Enjoy!

The Disney Channel 

Walt Disney

Destiny's Child

Joe Kelly

Google Tour Builder: Civil War Timeline

Earlier this year my students did a Google Tour Builder with the Donner Party--they mapped out the Donner Party's route west via Google's new Tour Builder.

This project was a huge success--for both the students and me!  The Google program was easy to use, and even in the beta version it had minor bumps and hiccups when the students used it.

I've been wanting to do a timeline-type activity for the Civil War, but wasn't impressed with any timeline software out there.  We've used Timeglider in the past, which is pretty good (and free!), but I didn't really like the appearance of it.  I then thought, "Wait, why couldn't we use Google Tour Builder to make a timeline?!"  It would be perfect: each battle/event would be a new "location", and with Tour Builder you can input start dates, end dates, information, location, pictures, and oodles of details.  This would be perfect!  Plus, the students already know how to use it since we used it earlier this year.  So I decided we'd go this route with our timeline.

Students were given several specific events/battles that they'd need on their timeline, along with what information each of their "locations" would need.

The students set out to create a timeline using Google Tour Builder.  The results were awesome--and definitely a much better looking (and interactive and very visual, with the map serving as the background) timeline than anything else I think I could have had them done.

Check out a few of the students' timelines below.  Once again, I'm super impressed with what they created and came up with!

Civil War Timeline 1

Civil War Timeline 2

Civil War Timeline 3

Civil War Timeline 4