Create Interactive Timelines Using Hstry....A Great Place To Connect With Your Students, Teachers and Others!

My friend Meridan and I have been checking out and creating with an awesome new digital tool.

It is called Hstry, an interactive, collaborative digital timeline creator.

Meridan wrote about it on her blog this week.....You can read Hstry!!! on Meridan's Little Voice.

She thinks Hstry is COOL and so do I.  I love hearing that she has found something to use with future projects and assignments. 

There are a lot of interactive timeline creators but what really stands out to me is the ability to creative interactive timelines which promotes collaboration and engagement in the classroom. 

I loved learning about all of the features Hstry including the ability to....

 Create timelines that will unleash creativity for yourself and your students;

 Engage by adding quiz questions to check for understanding and accessing student knowledge;

 Exploring a wealth of knowledge with rich, cross-curricular content;

 Express Yourself  by interacting and commenting on each timeline;

adding a variety of Media such as images, videos, and audio to bring your timelines to life;

and being available Everywhere on all devices in the classroom and at home with an internet connection. 

To start with Hstry, I created a new class.

I was super excited to see how easy it is for students to sign up and belong to a teacher's class.

When a student goes to Hstry for the first time, they will select I'm a student and I want to join my teacher's classroom at the bottom of the login page.

They will choose the School Class Code that was given to their teacher when they create the Hstry Class.  You can see a screen shot of what it looked like for the class I created.

All a student has to do is add 5306 to join Mrs. Miller's Library and fill out the additional information shown in the screen shot above.

It is that easy.  This really makes using Hstry a digital tool that can be used very easily with students in so many different ways.

For my first Hstry timeline I decided to make one called Books for Our Makers. 

This will be a fun place to share all kinds of Picture Books...

Instructional Books, eBooks, Magazines, and other resources for our Makers.

And not only share resources, but also ask the students to interact with what is shared on the Hstry timeline.

Check out how I engaged the learners with the different types of resources....

 I ask a Did You Know question....

 I asked a Quiz Question....

and I had them watch a Video I inserted from the Make website.

Once you have everything in the timeline that you would like to include, you push View The Timeline and it brings up the options to....

Share With My Students and choose the class you want to share it with, and...

share timeline with the community by clicking Share Timeline. 

Now I couldn't wait to see how easy it would be for Hagan to add to it as a student!

We went to Hagan's Hstry account, the one he signed up with using the class code, and the timeline was there under Class Timelines. 

He could see each one of the catagories of Maker Resouces and the things that I added to each.

He was also able to respond.  On the first one Did You Know?, he answered the question I asked about Rosie's flying machine.

How fun is this!  I love the way our students can connect to so many different resources, write, think, share, and collaborate together on the Hstry timelines.  

I can't wait to hear how you use it with your students too!  

There is a Hstry Basic and Hstry Premium account.  The Premium account gives one access to Hstry Bundles of Content, Lesson Plans and Rubrics; and Walkthrough Guides.  You can learn more about the two accounts here.

It was also exciting to see that they offer Free Professional Workshops!  That is always a big plus for me.