At a meeting I attended recently, one of the presenters used a great interactive timeline as the visual aid for his talk. It was really effective, so I felt inspired to go and have a look at the tool he used. It’s called TimelineJS and it’s a web-based tool which allows you to gather together images, video and audio to create time-based narratives. All you need to make your own is a Google account and a bit of time and imagination. You set up the data for your timeline in a Google spreadsheet and then click a button to generate the code. It’s that simple.

I thought that at this time of year, with teaching about to start, that it could be an interesting way to provide an overview of a module showing the major themes and important events that will be coming up. So, I put together my own overview of a fictitious module to see what it might look like.

I’ve been very limited in my use, I have only used images in my timeline, you can have video, audio and weblinks embedded too. This timeline could be used instead of Powerpoint as the basis for a presentation, or it can be published for people to explore themselves, as here. You can embed the timeline into a webpage or you can distribute a link to it. It relies on pulling together content from around the web, the images in my timeline are from the photo sharing service Flickr. You can also bring in Tweets, Instagram pictures, YouTube or Vimeo videos, GoogleMaps, Soundcloud audio and more to make a far richer experience.

The tool has been developed by Northwestern University Knight Lab a joint initiative of Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science and the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. It is one of a number of digital storytelling tools they are developing. You can find out more on the project overview page or you can head to the main TimelineJS web page to start making your own.

Thanks to Matt Jenner from UCL for the inspiration. His Future of Moodle timeline is worth a look, especially for anyone who has been involved in an “Online learning environment review” in Higher Education. Thanks also to Sultan Wadud from SOAS who pointed the meeting participants to his blog post Add visually-rich interactive timelines with Timeline JS to your Moodle Course which gives some useful instructions for making use of it.

Image credit: Old passed times by Marco Leo on Flickr