3D Timeline for Free

The Free Program

I was recently teaching a short series at my church on the book of Nahum. A short book means a short series. While preparing to teach the class, I realized how important the historical background was for making sense of Nahum's prophecies. In hopes of finding an eye-catching solution for a timeline, I stumbled across Timeline 3D (website). Since I recently converted to a MacBook, this free program for Mac looked great. There is also an app version for iOS on iPad, but there isn't yet a version for any other platforms.

The program is easy to use and works as advertised. It is a bit demanding on system resources when running in 3D mode, which doesn't mean that you should go get glasses to see some special effects. It just means that the program renders out the entries into graphics that then move in a three-dimensional digital environment.

Timeline 3D in event editor mode

Timeline 3D in 3D mode

Timeline 3D creates a very nice looking timeline and exports to several formats (webGL, PDF, slideshow, video file), but it will only export if you pay for it. The free version is fully functional, but you have to pay to get your good looking timeline out to some useable format. Since I'm not a big fan of paying for things until I've seen their usefulness, I had to come up with a workaround.

The Free Export

Displaying the 3D timeline in the program itself is demanding on system resources and was a little unwieldy, so I wanted to find another way to control the timeline presentation. The first step to keeping the look and feel of the program was to have the animation between the timeline events. That meant I had to export in a video. Thankfully, Mac OS comes with a version QuickTime that has a native screen recording feature. Just open QuickTime and select File, then New Screen Recording. After hitting the record button, QuickTime allows selection of the region of the screen to record, and I put the selection over the Timeline 3D app.

QuickTime darkens the unselected portion of the screen during recording.

Once QuickTime started recording, I proceeded through the events on the timeline, stopping for a few seconds at each event. At the end of the timeline, I stopped QuickTime's recording and exported the video. QuickTime has the ability to crop the video down, and I cut off whatever was extra from the beginning and the end of the video. Below is the result.

Timeline 3D video used for teaching the historical background to the book of Nahum.

Presentation Time

The final step was to create a Keynote presentation using the video. I put the video into one of the slides with a black background. I selected the video on the presentation slide, and under the Format button, I pushed the Movie button. This has the option of restraining the amount of the video that plays on any particular slide. On the first slide, I set it to show the first five seconds. After duplicating that slide, I moved the times of the video file to start at five seconds and then stop at ten seconds. Repeating this process until there are as many slides as timeline events creates a fluid presentation that maintains the 3D animation while permitting the addition of other content. This version is also far less demanding on the system resources than running directly from the Timeline 3D app.

New Literacy in a Web 2.0 World

Literacy in a post-digital revolutionary age crosses multiple media boundaries. In order for the coming generation of Web users and consumers to successfully navigate competing interests successfully, this generation of teachers must properly model sophisticated Web use and instruct students in "reading" the diversity of Web content.

In his chapter "What It All Means," Richardson identifies several ways in which the Read/Write Web has shifted communicating information, educating students, and defining learning.¹ Among those he lists, a few of them struck me as most important for classroom teachers to consider.

Modeling

Richardson very pointedly asserts that "to teach these technologies effectively, educators must learn to use them effectively."² This is so true as to seem unnecessary to state, but there are many teachers who feel like students should somehow already understand blogs and wikis without understanding these technologies themselves. Teachers can only teach about these technologies with confidence once they have learned about them through use and great familiarity. In any content area, like history or mathematics, people naturally assume the teacher should have an intimate grasp of the content. When it comes to the Web, however, many teachers simply assume that students already understand. Even worse, this leads to thinking that they, the teachers, do not need to become more than casual users and consumers. It is incumbent on educators to model Web content creation for students.

Where Over What

Another shift Richardson identifies is the importance of knowing where to find good information and teachers instead of memorizing that information.³ I chuckled when I read this, because it does not strike me as a shift; my grandmother used to tell me in the early 90s that knowing where to find the answers was just as good as knowing the answer from memory. She kept an impressive library in her small house. Where Richardson points out a shift in this, nevertheless, is in the proliferation of contributors to the Web since the advent of Web 2.0. The ever-growing numbers of those publishing information to the Internet means that there are more ways for a student to become confused or misled in his or her search for reliable information and quality instruction. Teachers must demonstrate and instruct students in the methods for finding Web sources they can trust and how to discriminate between reliable and unreliable sources. This should be part of curriculum despite department and discipline. Educators need to be intentional in teaching students to 'read' the Web for quality of information.

Multi-literate Students

Although Richardson points out many other useful areas for teacher attention, the last I found most pertinent to my classroom was his section about the multimedia nature of writing in a Web 2.0 world. As he states, "We can write in audio and video, in music, and in digital photographs, and even in code such as Javascript, ans we can publish all of it easily for extended audiences."⁴ This means that students will need to know how to 'read' images on the web (http://knowyourmeme.com/). Additionally, educators should equip students with an understanding of visual rhetoric so they will recognize the ways film and video producers appeal to them throw film and sound. This level of 'reading' content on the Web strengthens future Web to become sophisticated contributors to the Web and well-informed consumers.

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1 Richarson, W. (2006) Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. ^↩
2 ibid. 132-3. ^↩
3 ibid. 129-30. ^↩
4 ibid. 131. ^↩

Stand-out Web 2.0 Tools

There are two items I am very excited to get using this year. The first is the wiki. I am serious about a Caesar-pedia! I think that will infuse a new level of engagement for the students about who the characters of Shakespeare's play are and how they interact in the drama. Students will have to put an image with each entry and provide important quotations from the play. It is hard for me to wait until it happens. After finishing the class module on wikis, I went straight to my school's Moodle to check if there was a built in wiki tool. Jackpot! I'm already building the structure for it.

The other technology I am developing for instruction is augmented reality. The Aurasma app is a game-changer in the classroom. I showed one of my classes an example today, and the students were very impressed. It seems like a great way to construct stations for round-robin content review and for students to construct presentations to accompany projects. I have already spoken to the head of my school about using Aurasma in our art shows so that visitors can have videos of the student-artists describing their works. Each visitor's mobile device could act as a docent.

Audio and Video Casting

I've posted below an example of a short screencast I put together a couple of months ago to aid students in their preparation for a quiz in my class. I have plenty of experience with podcasting and screencasting both for church and school. A short video is a great way to reinforce instructions or construct a partial flip of a classroom.

This video was made using the Knowmia app on my iPad. The app is great because each of the slides is a separate card onto which audio is recorded. This means that if I make a mistake in the audio on one of the cards, I don't have to redo the audio for the whole video. When exporting the video, the system puts all the cards and their audio files into one video. It was a surprise for me to learn that Blogger allows direct import of video files into its system. I just uploaded the video directly to this post.

As I wrote above, screencasting, podcasting, and videocasting are great ways to reinforce instruction, remind students of directions, and rehearse content. I particularly think that screencasting is one of the most effective ways to deliver video and audio content in instruction. Its best use, however, would be to put the flexibility and creativity possibilities of a screencast into students' hands so that they can reach the highest levels of Bloom's taxonomy. Students could create their own vidcasts/screencasts as part of analysis of a character or as a way to animate a literary scene. Activities like this would address ISTE-S 1.b and 2.b. Students would be creating their own piece as a means of expression and would be communicating information and ideas using a variety of media.

Photo-sharing and Flickr

Photo-sharing was quite cumbersome in the early days of the Internet. I recall using email at first and then moving on to posting pictures on my own Web space. That also required sending an email to the people I wanted to see my pictures. When I first heard of Flickr, my friends who were into photography introduced me so they could show me their pictures. One of the most impressive features to me at the time was the way Flickr automatically scaled the images so a visitor could download a picture at different sizes and resolutions. Of course, titling and tagging are what make searching images possible on Flickr. It seems that Facebook and Instagram have become the most popular photo-sharing services at this point. Over the years I have also used DeviantArt (http://www.deviantart.com/) as a source for images. It can be edgy at times, but some of the digital art is amazing.

Here is a picture I took in while on a mission trip in Hungary.

Heroes' Square in Budapest

Flickr would make a good classroom resource for constructing storyboards as part of a pre-writing exercise. After assigning a topic, I could ask students to find four or five pictures on Flickr that contain a unifying element representative of an author, for example Poe. They would then use those images as a storyboard for composing a short story in the style of Poe.




I repeatedly use photos as part of my curriculum in vocabulary, grammar, and literary history. With grammar in particular, I use images to engage students in thinking about how they use language to describe the contents of a picture. This is a great point of departure for getting students to take a critical look at their own use of language.

An exercise like the Poe storyboard seems to apply most to the first standard of ISTE-S, Creativity and Innovation. Students would be creating something original as a means of self expression. Their storyboards would serve as the background for original writing.

Social Bookmarking

Before I read the segment on tagging, I was a bit confused about what social bookmarking could possibly be. Tagging, however, made it entirely clear given the rise of the hashtag. The term folksonomy was especially helpful for me in conceiving of the way users construct categories of information.

A social bookmarking website could be very useful for gathering a collection of student-safe web resources. Teachers could create a repository of websites that have been reviewed in advance for safety and reliability. Students could search through these collected pages in order to perform research at various levels without much concern they will view inappropriate material.

With the use I described, students would have to fulfill standard 2.a of ISTE-S by interacting with peers and experts and employing a variety of digital media to do so. Again with this activity, I feel like CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.8 is directly applicable.

RSS on the WWW

Years ago I tried using an RSS feed aggregator inside of Mozilla's Thunderbird. It was great at first. All of the blog posts and new articles on my favorite football teams or from my favorite news sources came right to my email application. I could scan through them quickly to stay abreast of the latest.

Eventually, however, I added too many feeds. Missing a day of checking them off as Read meant that the number of new posts grew to unrealistic amounts. It felt overwhelming, and I started ignoring that part of Thunderbird by marking all new entries as Read. The whole thing became a bit of a waste.

Later, I found out about Mozilla's live bookmarks, and that was exactly what I needed! The browser could hold ten or so of my favorite feeds, and no longer did I feel like I had 50 email inboxes that were filling up. Instead, the feeds were just button I could hold the mouse over to check if anything new had been published. This is the way I still use RSS feeds.

In the classroom, an RSS feed aggregator could greatly aid courses in finding the latest on a topic under study. For example, in an ELA class studying Shakespeare, the class could set up an account for news and publication feeds about Shakespeare and his plays. It could be a weekly part of the curriculum to check the class feeds and summarize news on Shakespeare research or performances.

An class assignment of this type would satisfy numerous Common Core objectives. In particular, this standard really jumps out in my mind:

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.8
Gather relevant information from multiple authoritative print and digital sources, using advanced searches effectively; assess the usefulness of each source in answering the research question; integrate information into the text selectively to maintain the flow of ideas, avoiding plagiarism and following a standard format for citation.

The portions about "using advanced searches effectively" and "assess the usefulness of each source" strike me as particularly relevant.

This activity would apply to ISTE-S (ISTE - Student PDF) in that students would have to "select and use applications effectively and productively" (6.b) and "evaluate and select information sources based on the appropriateness to specific tasks" (3.c).