Common Sense

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Best Timeline Creators and Templates

Timelines are important tools for exploring a brief period of time or a topic that spans centuries. By exploring and creating timelines, students will learn the chronology of historical events and begin to see the cause-and-effect relationships between time periods. On this list, there are interactive timelines students can explore covering everything from the American Revolution to the concept of freedom in the U.S. to art history. There are also apps and websites that make timeline creation easy, allowing students to sequence events into explorable multimedia stories.

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Timeline Creation Tools

ReadWriteThink

Excellent free resource for all things reading and writing

Bottom line: A language arts teacher's dream; lesson plans, professional development, and all-around quality support.

Grades: Pre-K–12 Price: Free
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RWT Timeline

Simple timeline creation tool for a variety of purposes

Bottom line: Easy-to-use tool lets students create simple, boilerplate timelines.

Grades: 2–5 Price: Free
  • Download from App Store
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Prezi Next

Multimedia presentation tool features useful templates and 3D zoom

Bottom line: With its zoom in and out capabilities, Prezi helps teachers and students go beyond traditional slideshows to put important content front and center.

Grades: 6–12 Price: Free, Free to try, Paid
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Common Sense Selection

Sutori

Build timelines, embed media with cool storytelling tool

Bottom line: With a super-simple design and tons of flexible features, this is an appealing and intuitive way for teachers and students to organize and share class content.

Grades: 6–12 Price: Free, Paid
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Tiki-Toki

Create eye-catching multimedia timelines for any purpose

Bottom line: Multimedia timelines connect events visually, creating pathways for deeper analysis of any chronological story.

Grades: 6–12 Price: Free, Paid
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TimelineJS

Timeline tool is useful but limited for coding novices

Bottom line: Check it out if you're a Google classroom looking to create simple, appealing timelines that integrate media and allow for collaboration.

Grades: 7–12 Price: Free
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TimeToast

Simple timeline creator could use more features and options

Bottom line: An easy to use timeline tool for one-off projects, but for sustained use teachers will need to upgrade, and ultimately the features might not be robust enough.

Grades: 8–12 Price: Free, Paid
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Interactive Timelines

Smarthistory

Bring traditional art education to life with fresh, interactive multimedia

Bottom line: A worthy supplement to an art history or humanities class.

Grades: 8–12 Price: Free
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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

History and art intersect on the Met's vast, reading-centric site

Bottom line: This resource from the Metropolitan Museum of Art beautifully illustrates art's evolution and is great for research, but more interactivity would help balance out the text-heavy content.

Grades: 9–12 Price: Free
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