Timelines in OneNote

- How can we help our stu­dents to con­nect the top­ics we teach?

1: Timelines as different tables on the canvas

This exer­cise uti­lizes 3 cool fea­tures of OneNote:

• The infi­nite scroll. There is no lim­it to the scope of a time­line, and you can go back and expand and elab­o­rate on it.
• The free move­ment of con­tent box­es around the can­vas. Stu­dents can shuf­fle and play around with con­tent box­es pre­pared by the teacher
• The ease of cre­at­ing tables by hit­ting the ‘tab’ key: If you want to cre­ate a ver­ti­cal time­line, you can just press ‘tab’ and OneNote cre­ates an emp­ty cell for a year. When you have enough years, just click ‘ctrl’ + ‘enter’ and you can start adding infor­ma­tion to your timeline.

I sim­ply cre­at­ed a page with 6 con­tent box­es con­tain­ing a time­line each of a his­to­ry course, and then dis­trib­uted the page to the indi­vid­ual stu­dent sections.

Their job was to place the con­tent box­es in chrono­log­i­cal order, and then fin­ish the time­lines of the dif­fer­ent cours­es by adding as many impor­tant events and years as they wanted.

Images and videos could also be added  ‑but that might dis­turb the pur­pose of the exer­cise, which is to develop/support/maintain the chrono­log­i­cal overview.

2: All topics in one table

This year I tried anoth­er approach for rep­e­ti­tion of 14 dif­fer­ent top­ics taught over 3 years in nonchrono­log­i­cal order. I cre­at­ed a tem­plate with all top­ics and then the stu­dents had to divide euro­pean his­to­ry into peri­ods and place the top­ics in the template. 

If we zoom out, we see which parts/ages of his­to­ry, we are shed­ding a light on, and which parts are left in the dark. 

When the stu­dents are fin­ished build­ing this overview, they should answer the fol­low­ing questions:

Why do you think you have been taught top­ics in just Dan­ish history?

When was Dan­ish his­to­ry par­tic­u­lar­ly influ­enced by World history?

Which prin­ci­ples have you used for periodization?

What does this visu­al­iza­tion tell us?

Have you tried using OneNote for timelines?