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. ^↩