This week my US History students started building “year in review” timelines using XTimeline. I’ve done this in years past with other courses and found it to be a good final project as it forces students to review material prior to the final exam. CNN Student News uses the same concept in their final episode of the school year. Included in the final episode is a segment reviewing their five most popular news stories of the school year. The video is embedded below.

Applications for Education
After watching this episode of CNN Student News you could have students discuss what they think were the most important news stories of the year. Students could make their own year-in-review videos by grabbing images (Creative Commons or public domain of course) of news stories, writing captions, and putting it all together in an Animoto video.