As a student I loved looking at timelines in my social studies textbooks. As a history teacher I still love timelines. Timelines in a web browser or as a stand-alone app can offer students more information than a paper-based timeline. Recently, I spent a little time looking for free timeline apps to use on my iPad. While there are a lot of paid apps I didn’t find too many free ones that I liked, but I did find three. Here are the three that I like.

American Revolution Interactive Timeline for iPad sports the best visuals of the three apps on this list. The timeline features images of artifacts related to the American Revolution. Students can click on the artifacts in the timeline to read a bit about each artifact’s relevance to the American Revolution.

Timeline Eons is a freemium app that displays major events throughout the history of the world. The app’s search function allows you to search for a date, an event, or a place. The free version of the app allows access to all the timelines for the first ten days that you use it. After the first ten days you’re limited to 1950 to the present.

LineTime Presidents Edition is a timeline of all the U.S. Presidents. As students scroll through the app they can click on a president’s image to open pop-up box containing the biography of that president. It should be noted that the biographies are pulled from Wikipedia entries.