BP4_Dipity

In the past few years, I have noticed students having a hard time with their perception of time and dates. I found this really neat tool called dipity can help students become more aware of how their perceive time and dates. It is a simple web2.0 tool that can be easily manipulated by anyone. In my practice of this tool I made a very simplistic timeline for some of the events we covered this past week and upcoming week of events in my personal classroom. Some ideas I had for this site to use personally are:

timeline for my FS projects (CBR, individual courses, and group and personal projects)
timeline for teacher lesson planning
timeline for students to use and make to show their understanding of events in social studies or even literature
timeline for students to use and make to show their processes through mathematical understandings

There are soooo many ways for anyone and everyone to incorporate different types of timelines in to their lives but I must say that dipity is very user friendly and FREE!

Check out the following pictures and easy to use steps to set up your own dipity timeline!

Upon your arrival at dipity.com you will see the main page and currently it is being updated with a timeline on the current protests that are happening in Tunisia. As you can see these timelined events can also be marked with pictures and specific descriptions that are linked to the event.

Ok, now that you know the basics....all you need to do is make a free account and click 'create timeline' in the upper left hand corner of the screen...

From here you will then enter the information you would like listed for your timeline. What is neat about this section is that you can allow your timeline to be private or public and set the parameters if people can edit or just view your timeline.

What I think would be cool is to make a public timeline for students to manipulate as they are learning about current events or even learning about a specific time period in their units in school.

After entering the basics for your timeline, you will then be redirected to a page for you to add any additional tags, blogs, videos, pictures, or even comments to your timeline. This settings page is also available throughout the making of your timeline.

After you have finished the skeleton of your timeline, you can then start making your timeline. You simply have to click 'add event' and enter the descriptions that appear and it will automatically add your event to your timeline. You also have the availability to add pictures and videos to your timeline as you work.

On the left hand side of your timeline you will see a scrolling bar where you can zoom in or out of your timeline dependent on if you want to see your timeline by years, months, days, or even hours!

Once you have completed your timeline you have a few different options on how you can view your timeline. The viewing choices you have are either timeline, flipbook, list, or map.

Here are the various views of the timeline once you have it completed and you want to view it as any of these options. The only one I had a hard time with is the map option. The screen kept blanking out and did not allow me to view it any other way. If you are able to get this to work, please comment below to help me out :)

Timeline (Week)

 Flipbook (You do have the availability to upload pictures into your timeline which would then show a picture in this feature of your flipbook)

 List

Lastly, another neat feature the dipity allows you to do is to share your timeline through various other platforms. All you have to do is simply click on the web platform you would like to share this with and you are on the go and social networking!

I definitely see this web2.0 tool being helpful in and out of the classroom. It was very easy to use and the best part to it is that it is completely FREE! Whenever I talk to my students about timelines we end up using our spirals and turning them the hot dog way and draw a line and continue a timeline that way...Many times our events become skewed with their times because of how it is listed in our spiral. Using this tool would definitely help students become more motivated and precise in their understanding of time and eras in our lives.