The year is almost over and for many of us this is a time to look back at the year. Creating a year-in-review is a great way to celebrate our successes and learn from our failures. Creating a multimedia timeline is one way that your students can structure a year-in-review. They can make personal year-in-review timelines or make a timeline to review the biggest news stories of the year. The following three tools all provide a good way to create multimedia timelines.

The History Project provides a fantastic platform for creating personal year-in-review timelines. The History Project lets you upload your own pictures or import pictures from social networks to add to your timeline. Each event on your timeline can include multiple pictures. After adding a picture to a timeline event you can record audio to add to that event. You also have the option to upload an existing audio recording. Of course, like any good time tool, The History Project lets you write in notes, dates, and locations. When you write in a location a Google Map of that location is added to your timeline event. A video overview of The History Project can be seen on my YouTube channel.

Timeline JS offers nearly unlimited flexibility for including media in a timeline. Timeline JS timelines can include pictures, videos, audio files, and maps. Students can collaborate on the creation of multimedia timelines published through Timeline JS. The video embedded below provides an overview of how to use Timeline JS.

Read Write Think’s timeline creation tool is a great choice for elementary school settings. Students don’t have to create accounts in order to use the tool. It can be used on Chromebooks, laptops of all varieties, iPads, and Android tablets. The only limitation to it is that students can only use pictures and text in their timelines.

More ideas and directions for developing and using multimedia timelines will be shared in Teaching History With Technology starting in January.