Bringing History to Life

Everyone has a story to tell.  Our students need to tell their stories.  Every time I teach a storytelling class, particularly when I play The Apple Tree Game (students tell a short story, others try to guess if it's real or not; As I climbed the apple tree, all the apples fell on me, apple pudding, apple pie, is this story a truth or a lie?--courtesy of storyteller Doug Lipman), I am astounded by the range of experiences these young people have encountered.

Keeping this in mind I tend to be drawn to websites offering some form of digital storytelling.  Ever since I read Kelly Tenkley's post on iLearn Technology October 23, 2012 describing myHistro, I have wanted to try the site.  Creating visual histories using maps and timelines offers countless possibilities in the classroom as well as for personal documentation.

Use of this application is free.  Users can sign in with their Facebook, Geni, Foursquare or Linkedin accounts or register with a first and last name, email address and password.  You must be thirteen years old or above to use this site.

Other features of the site are:

• can include photographs, videos and narrative
• unlimited space, unlimited photographs and as many histories as you like
• easy to create, add and edit
• drag and drop tool for placing a single event in more than one story
• three viewing options
• simple organizational tools
• import information from other sites
• six languages represented
• can embed in website or blog
• collaboration tools
• stories can be public or private

Upon logging in the first time you have several options.  You can toggle between the pages labeled Home, Me, Friends and Explore. On the home page you can access your Dashboard (first page), Profile, Events, Stories, Collections, Gallery, Smart-add for creating events from photos and quick add of event.  The me page is a simple list of your events and stories.  Friends is self-explanatory; they may be added from Facebook.  You can search for people or stories, popular tags and popular stories on the explore page.

Your profile page gives you access to your events and stories as well as updating profile information (photograph, as much personal as you want to include) and password change. The events and stories pages are lists of each of those items.  On the collections page are groups of stories with the same tag.  All your created stories are grouped in the gallery page.

Before beginning I scanned through the help section to get a feel for how to use this application.  I decided to create a story revolving around the historical fiction title The Water Seeker by Kimberly Willis Holt.  The story chronicles the life of Amos Kincaid, a dowser's son from 1833 to 1859 complete with a trip on the Oregon Trail.  

To begin I selected the Events page and clicked on the green Create new event button.  A new window pops up as an overlay on the page.  It asks you to name the event, give a specific date (year, month, day)(an end date can also be selected), add a narrative in bold, italics, underline, inserting a link or bulleted list, add a picture and search for a place on the map.  

After the event is created that window is closed taking you back to the original page.  When you mouse over the created events you have the option to edit, view or delete them.  Above your listed events you can search for other events or filter them by various categories.

To create a story go to that page.  When you initially register a story with your name is automatically created.  I changed my title to The Water Seeker adding a short description and image.  At this point you can add collaborators, tags, select a privacy option and comment features.  To add events to your story go to number 2.

You simply drag events from the list on the left to the story space on the right.  At this point generating a new event is also available.  You can search for events, jump to a specific date, or list your events by date or when they were created.  Mousing over individual events allows the user to edit, view or move them to the story.

When the events are added to the story they become darker and clearer on the right while appearing more faded on the left.  Click the green Save story button when you are done.  The next page is the viewing page for your story.

You can zoom in and out, play the story, see a thumbnail map of the entire storyline, view a larger map front and center which highlights single events, edit, delete or add another event to your completed story, post the story on Facebook, export it, view your tags, view a story summary and copy the embed code.  A story summary looks like this image.  When you are playing through the events in your story and wish to make use of hyperlinks, you must click on the read more button to make them active.

Your story can be shared on more than 330 social networks, emailed or printed.  There are two available embed codes; one as shown below and one where the story plays automatically.  Here is the short story I generated at this site.

While this web 2.0 application focuses on history, it could also be used to plan events in the future; similar to Tripline (reviewed here).  To tell you the truth, after I had this post finished, I could hardly get to sleep thinking about all the different stories which could be created using this website (there is an app for your iPhone also).  myHistro will definitely find a place in my virtual toolbox.

Historical events were located from the website HistoryOrb.

Keeping Track of Time

Heather Moorefield, Education Librarian at Virginia Tech and former chair of the American Association of School Librarians Best Websites for Teaching and Learning frequently tweets about websites and apps she feels might be of interest to the educational community.  Recently she mentioned a web 2.0 application capable of creating simple timelines.  As far as I can tell this service has been up and running since 2009.

TimeToast is free to use with no age limitations that I could find in the Terms of Service or Privacy Policy but I always tend to be cautious, keeping parents and my administration advised about applications students are using.  I'm noting this because there is a Browse feature on the site allowing for the viewing of other created timelines.  It is necessary to have an email address to register.

The Browse button is located in the upper-right hand corner of the home page.  Included are these main categories:

• music
• politics
• film
• biography
• science and technology
• art and culture
• business
• personal
• history

At the bottom of the home page is another way to search under the heading of Explore.  Users can search by popular timelines, updated timelines or latest timelines.

To register click the bright red Sign Up! button on the home page.  Registration requires a username, email address and password plus agreeing to follow the terms and conditions.  An email will be sent to activate your account.  You can also sign up using your Facebook account.

When you have signed in a new window appears asking if you want to create a new timeline, view your previously created timelines, browse the latest timelines, browse categories or view your profile.  Your profile is accessed along with editing or closing your account by clicking on the account button in the upper-right hand corner of the page.  Your profile can include a link to your website or blog.

When you click on create a new timeline a screen pops up asking you to give your timeline a title, select a category and insert an image. Click Go. You can now add an event, a timespan or edit the title and picture.  When you click Add event, new options are shown.

You must include a title and a date.  You can choose to add a description, a link and an image.  When using this with students, the  adding of images is always a good time to talk about copyright and appropriate sources to use.

At any time by clicking on an individual event you can edit or delete it.  After completing your work, beneath the timeline on the left side is a button to click, View this timeline.  This takes you to more options.

You can edit the timeline, change it from draft (draft timelines can't be viewed) to public, add tags and view it in text format.  Once you have made the timeline public it can be embedded or shared via Facebook or Twitter.  TimeToast creates a direct link, provides an HTML code or users can create their own code and color for the background.

A timeline status can be changed from public back to draft.  A box is provided for viewer comments.  

For generating a simple, interactive historical perspective with descriptions, images and links TimeToast is a great choice.  Students can work individually or together researching a series of events with different dates on a specific topic or a single date across the years. This could be used to plan a project with specific goals to be met in a given time period.  I can see using this with nonfiction titles as well as fiction titles or a combination of the two to design a visual representation.

I decided to do a little research about events that have happened on October 31 over the years.

Dipping Into Time

Within the Standards for the 21st Century Learner, Content Collaboration, the following standards are addressed by the web 2.0 application Dipity:  Standard 1.3.4 Contribute to the exchange of ideas within a learning community and 3.1.2 Participate and collaborate as members of a social and intellectual network of learners.  Dipity made the Top 25 Websites for Teaching and Learning, AASL 2011. 

As stated at the website Dipity's mission is to organize the internet's data by date and time. 

To use the free services provided by Dipity click on Create a Timeline.  You must be over 13 years of age, give your first and last name, a username and password.  As with many online services, tabs run across the top right hand side that give users the opportunity to go to their Dashboard, Profile, My Topics, Following (topics or people) and Settings (for your account).

To begin a topic click on Create a Timeline.  Initially you need to fill in blanks for the topic name, a short description, a subject category, your timezone, a topic thumbnail photo and your settings on who can view and contribute to this topic--Private or Anyone.

When you continue a screen appears that  allows you to add events to the timeline, search Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and Google News, add photos from Flickr and Picasa, include videos from either YouTube or Vimeo, incorporate blogs from Blogger, WordPress or Tumblr, gather music from Last.fm or Pandora, use messaging from Twitter or Friendfeed, attach other Dipity timelines or use Simile Timeline XML.  Yelp, Digg, Delicious and any RSS feeds are allowed to become part of a particular timeline.

Timelines or topics as well as events can be edited or deleted. 

When looking at a timeline there are several views:  timeline, flipbook, list and map.  A timeline can be shared on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, MySpace, StumbleUpon or embedded in a website or blog with HTML code.

This application would be a fantastic educational enhancement to any unit involving the passage of time; author studies, events, or even student of the week with assistance from parents for younger students.  Timelines could be started with students completing them or students could work in groups. 

This would be another technique for reviewing a book in the historical fiction genre; create a timeline, fiction and real, based upon the storyline.

Iditarod-The Last Great Race on Dipity.

Dipity is definitely going in my educational toolbox for this coming year.