Sunday, April 3, 2011

TimeToast




As a final project in my Stride for Freedom class I wanted kids to create a timeline of what they felt were the 20 most important events/topics we covered in the 9 week course.

Rather than have kids do the old fashioned poster board with markers, glue and scissors I took the advice of Mrs. Cannon and decided that a digital version might be of more interest and less mess to my kids.

Mrs. Cannon had recommended Dipity.com to me as she had used it in the past and thought it worked well. When I tried it I found it to be not as user friendly as I’d hoped so I tried another site called Timetoast.

It’s very easy to create specific points as well as time spans along a timeline. It also allows the user to add photos to each point as well. It updates in real time so losing progress is never an issue.

Viewing a finished product can be done in timeline format or text format. The timeline version is visually captivating and draws the eye to it as each event magnifies as your cursor draws near the points on the timeline. The text format however is much easier from a reading standpoint and more importantly for me a grading standpoint.

Having used it I’ve already thought up a number of different ways I could incorporate this to use as a teaching tool as well as other lessons for students to use it in other classes.

www.timetoast.com is the website. It’s free to sign up and all a person needs is an email address.


Here’s an example of one of my students projects.
http://www.timetoast.com/timelines/128481

Todd Kopecky, High School Social Studies

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