What it is: Nasa has hundreds of great online tools for the classroom, their Interactive Timeline is the one of the most impressive. The multimedia timeline begins in 500BC and follows the search for extrasolar planets to modern discoveries. Students can “autoplay” the timeline for a journey through the history of space discovery or explore at their own pace. Students can search the timeline by key milestones, technology, discoveries, or by thought and culture.
How to integrate Nasa Interactive Timeline into the classroom: The Nasa Interactive Timeline is a great way to teach students about the history of space discovery and thought. Students can gain an understanding about historical figures, key events, and key discoveries. At any point, the timeline can be paused for discussion. Nasa’s Interactive Timeline would be well used as an introduction or anticipatory set for further exploration. View the timeline on autoplay as a class using a projector or interactive whiteboard, or allow students to explore the timeline on their own during center time on classroom computers or individually during lab time. Assign students a key historical figure or time period to learn more about. Students can present their findings to the class when their time period or figure comes up on the timeline.
Tips: The Interactive Timeline gives basic information. Encourage your students to find additional resources and information about each event, historical figure, or time period.
Leave a comment and share how you are using Nasa Interactive Timeline in your classroom.
Wow. Thanks for the tip, firstly because the tool itself is cool, but also because I didn’t even know that NASA had such an extensive group of resources for educators. I think that interactive timelines are a great tool to engage students with historical material and I have been excited to see more and more appearing. Have you seen Dipity? http://www.dipity.com/
Thanks for the great tip. I’ll be sharing it with my history teachers today!
Wow. I am so excited about this. My kids are a little young to use the actual timeline feature now, but since they are starting to learn about timelines in general, I think the autoplay feature is very cool to give them a sense of how it works.
Of course I cannot wait to play it on the whiteboard!