This month’s blog post on an AASL Best Website for Teaching and Learning is focused on a favorite that won in 2015, Hstry (https://www.hstry.co/). This site is a multimedia timeline creation tool that will work on your laptop, Chromebook, iPad, or tablet. Students can interact and comment on peer timelines. Users can add a variety of media to highlight important biographical, historical, or literary events in chronological order. They can also add in video, images, audio, and text to the events on their engaging timeline.

Similar to a social media feed like Facebook Hstry is really easy to use. Build timelines in a linear, vertical format. Students, teachers, and librarians simply pick a topic and load a cover photo. From there it’s easy to add events to the timeline by clicking the “+” symbol and choosing the variations of media desired for the timeline. Audio, video, text, and images can all be added to your interactive and engaging timeline.

Screenshot of Hstry

Teachers and peer librarians can create a class account to view all student timelines in one location. Teachers and librarians can also create their own timelines complete with questions for a more engaging timeline experience for students. If you are looking for a timeline tool this is an amazing choice. It is user-friendly, free, and simple. The final product looks really clean and neat. No matter the topic whether it’s social studies, history, science, or language arts, if you need to lay anything out in chronological order this is an excellent resource.

Author: Heather Moorefield-Lang

Heather Moorefield-Lang is an associate professor at The University of South Carolina in the School of Library and Information Science. To see more of Heather’s work visit her website at www.techfifteen.com, email her at moorefield-lang@sc.edu, or follow her on Twitter @actinginthelib.

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Categories: Blog Topics, Technology