Timeline Magic: 5 Reasons to Love Time Graphics in the Classroom

Thanks for listening to the Tech Tools for Teachers podcast, where each week we talk about a free p to two of technology that you can use in your classroom. I'm your host, Shanna Martin. I'm a middle school teacher, technology and instructional coach for my district.

And I'm our producer and husband, Fuzz Martin. And a fun fact, I always edit this podcast at 06:30 p.m. cause it's the best time, hands down. You have to think about that one for a moment.

630.

Yeah. 630. The hands are both down on the clock.

Yeah.

Okay.

I got it.

Okay.

Yeah. That was. That was fabulous. Good job.

Thank you.

Oh, my. We got jokes.

We got jokes.

We're here. Episode 193 in the middle of October.

Yeah.

Chaos.

Spooky season.

Spooky season. Yeah. Parent teacher conferences. A thousand other things going on. You know, just a thing or two.

Homecoming for some. Yeah.

Yep. Other activities. We'll have red ribbon week coming up soon. I'm presenting at the my PITA conference coming up at the end of the month.

There's so many things. So many things going on. So we have a fun little quick tool to share today. And if you haven't guessed it, it has to do with time. Time after time.

It is a timeline creator, which I love one of these. And they can be used in so many different content areas. So we're talking about time graphics. Time graphics. And my five highlights for time graphics.

Then I'll go into all the different things you can do with it because it's a pretty cool tool. It is. It's very easy to navigate. Like, you click the create button.

First of all, it's a time. It's a timeline.

It's a timeline creator.

Yes.

So it's a timeline builder, and it is super easy to navigate. So it is. You click create, you make one. Yay. There's lots of tools within the timeline creator to build things, and they're not hard to find.

Like, you don't have to search for stuff. There's just like this little wheel, and I'll. And I'll kind of talk about it.

But, like, add a video, add an image, add your things, add your information, add a graph out of Google. Like, everything. Just like, pull over. Everything's from your Google Drive. Very sweet. I build your timeline. Boom. It's great.

You can upload all your own images and your own information, which is really helpful, especially if kids are doing, like, research projects or sharing, like, family timelines. Whatever they want to do. You can download it in a variety of formats so you don't just get one way to download.

You can download it in a bunch of different ways when you're done with it and it's really easy to share with others. So it's pretty cool tool and it has lots and lots of options. So let's talk about officially timeline creator.

So time graphics is what it's like, what you go to when you're pulling up the website, the link that you're going to want. It's time dot graphics. So time dot graphics, G R A P H I C s. That's all you need to get to it.

They have their free timeline maker and you get a couple of free ones and then they have like the upgrades to premium and things like that. But you know, you can make things work as you need to. So you get two for free and then you go from there.

And when you get the screen pulled up, it's really easy. You just like upper left hand part of the screen says new event.

When you click on it, you get these little like this little round circle of more circles. The circle of circles. But that's where all your tools are, which is cool. Just lands right on your timeline. So then you can add your event.

When you do, you then have the option of adding pictures. Like I said before, video images.

You can drop in Google Map information, you type in what your event is, you type in your description, you put your date in it, then gives you the option for general color and then text color. So when it's building the timeline, it starts with like years and you can zoom in, zoom out as you'd like to.

And so like right now, I've got my generation, like the general color is like the lines and the circles and then my text is a different color. Then you have the option to change out your text layout.

So if you are particular about your timelines, I know some people like line in the text to the left or the text above or the text to the right. You can choose where that stuff goes.

Then there's different designs for like do you want your text above a little dot or do you want a box for your text? Or do you want just the line? Or there's different little bubbles. I'm doing the little bubbles position above or below your timeline.

You can tag everything, duplicate it, all of it's right there. And you just type in your information, what do you want? And then once you click off of it, boom, it's there, which is really cool.

You can zoom in and zoom out. So they have the options. There's a little plus and minus on the right hand side of your screen. You can zoom in, zoom out.

You can also pinch to zoom in and out as well.

Yes. Like you can, like in a regular document.

Yeah.

And then when you go to like, add another event, you have those little circle options again.

So what's cool about you could add, just add information to your event or add your media into your event, but also in those like little circle of options, if you hover over the Google things, it will show you. You could import information from Google Analytics, which is awesome.

You can import information from a Google calendar and you can import information from a Google spreadsheet. So it can pull your information that you already have in your Google Drive to then create the things on your timeline.

Yeah, that's cool.

Which is cool. And then there's grouping of information, so you can add a group of events in your timeline.

And then you also have options for just all kinds of data. You can add just all kinds of data to your timeline. There's just more and more options.

I think the analytics thing is pretty cool, depending on what you're using it for.

So there's just so many choices for attaching media and dates and color coding and I don't know, I just added stuff like project complete and then like the bar graph of revenue just dropped in there. Like, there's just so many things. Like, eh, there's more information putting in there.

So what's really cool about it, if you're having a student's work through, I love a good timeline with my students, but you can use them for so many different things. So you can have a kid timeline their life.

If they're doing a personal narrative, which a lot of our kids are doing narrative writing right now, they could timeline out the narrative information. Like in ElA, in social stays, we time timeline out events. We're talking about Wisconsin history stuff right now.

Like, I should go fire or the Oakfield tornado or things like that. Like, kids can timeline out actual events in history.

In science, you can have them timeline out very various things depending on like, scientific discoveries and things like that. Math. If they're going to pull like, data and analytics, they can do all that.

So there's just so many different ways to use these, like timeline builders. And this one's really cool. It's very easy to use. It'll connect to your Google Drive, which is nice. Nice.

And then when you go to export the information, you can pull it as like a JpG. Like a JPeg image a PNG image PDF PowerPoint word document, Excel file, you can download to Google Drive, you can upload it to Dropbox.

Like you have all of these options to share it as well, which I think is cool. And you can just click view and you can see how your timeline lays out, which is pretty awesome if you just must see how things are.

You also have the option to embed it and share via like email or just copy the link and share it with other people and you can make them public or private. So there's just a lot of options when it comes to like building this timeline creator.

And it'd be an easy way to get kids, older students, I'd say probably 6th grade on up with this one. Sure, fifth grade might be able to use it, but when they're going through decree, there's just a way to like crank it out.

Or as a teacher, if you want to do something as a class, it's a great visual. Kids get information. You could be leading it as a class and build the timeline together.

So there's just a lot of different ways to use the timeline and make all of those things work, which is awesome. Are you building as you go?

I can see, yeah, I was building the timeline of the Tech Tools for Teachers podcast.

Nice.

Yeah. Which started five years and nine months ago.

Well, that's fun.

Yeah. In our kitchen.

It did.

In our kitchen and our old baby blue countertops.

We've come so far.

We've come so far.

But yeah, so time dot graphics, it is a super cool timeline builder.

I like that I was able to just jump in and create without having to create an account.

Yeah.

And I was able to just start making stuff go.

Yeah, which is really cool because that's the other piece too. Like if you don't want to, if you don't want to download, you don't need to download it.

If you're just like building in class or need a visual for kids and you're maybe you're like want it to manipulate it in class, you know, on the wall, like those types of things, you don't have to download it and save it and all that kind of stuff too, you can just create with it and work on like chronological order of things, which is always like the big, like what does chronological order mean for kids? And then this is how it looks to have that visual with them, which is pretty cool.

So, yeah, there's just a lot of cool things about time graphics that allows you to do stuff. So there you go.

And it keeps on ticking into the future.

It does. And there are also public timelines too.

So if you like, love a good timeline, there's been timelines created by other people which are pretty fun that you can kind of go and dig into as well. So those are options for you to look into. So there you go. Time graphics. A quick little time savor in your classroom in the chaos of October.

Yeah, you know, it's kind of fun. Yeah, it'll save you a little time.

It will. Thanks for tuning in.

This has been the Tech Tools for Teachers podcast if you ever have any questions, you can find me on the app formerly known as Twitter (Elon's Thing) at SmartinWi or on threads. And if you want to get more information on the links to the technology discussed in this episode, you can visit smartinwi.com.

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New episodes each week, most of the time. Thanks for listening. Go educate and innovate.

The ideas and opinions expressed on this podcast and the SmartnWI website are those of the author Shanna Martin, and not of her employer. Prior to using any of the technologies discussed on this podcast, please consult with your employer.

Regulations this podcast offers no guarantee that these tools will work for you as described, but we sure hope they do, and we'll talk to you next time right here on the Tech Tools for Teachers podcast. Bye.