Timeline of Singapore History

Grade 5 students attend the National Museum of Singapore to study Singapore history as a component of their 'Formation of a Nation' social studies unit. One of the benchmarks from the unit requires the students to use 'visual representations such as timelines and diagrams, to understand and demonstrate significant events in the development of Singapore and the United States.'

Timeline JS is an excellent resource for creating interactive timelines that can be embedded in a blog.

Here is the sample I created for the students.

Students start with a Google spreadsheet that has been copied into their Google Drive. They add dates and details of events from Singapore's history, along with photos from the museum exhibit. Once the spreadsheet has been published to the web, Timeline JS can generate the embed code for their blog.

Adding photos that are not currently available on the Internet is a time-consuming process and is detailed below:

1. Go to your Picasa Web Album
   
   https://picasaweb.google.com/home
   
2. Click Upload
3. Name the album
4. Drag and drop your images
5. Click OK
6. The photos will be visible to only you, so click Edit
7. Change the Visibility to Public on the web
8. Click Save changes
9. Click on a photo to open it
10. Click Link to this photo
11. Check Image only (no link)
12. Select and copy the Embed image code
13. Paste this code into your timeline spreadsheet

To allow students to focus on the benchmark rather than the technology, students were provided with a Google presentation. The presentation consisted of a photo per slide with the link below. All they needed to do was to copy the link, and paste it into the appropriate cell of the spreadsheet to make the image appear on the timeline.

Students were encouraged to find other images from the internet to add to their timeline, and advised to give credit to the source. Timeline JS also enables upload of YouTube videos! This was an amazing feature, especially when to came to being able to include video of the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima.

This has been a tech resource that has been very well received by both teachers and students.