Monday, November 7, 2011

Web 2.0 Tool Tiki-Toki

As a part of my grad course, while I was reviewing some media sharing resources, I came across a wonderful web tool named Tiki-Toki.  Since this was totally new to me, I got curious and started exploring it. I found that Tiki-Toki is a web application that makes it easy for anyone to create interactive timelines in their browsers. Variety of  images, text and even videos from YouTube, Vimeo.... can be embedded in these timelines. We can share our timelines  too. If we sign up with their paid-for accounts, then we can embed our timelines on our own blog or websites.

I signed up for free account to explore it further and created one timeline on 'History of Indian Education System'.(Click on it to view it!) I used videos from YouTube, picked images from Flickr Creative Commons to go along with the text, chose a background image for my timeline and filled in the text details for each title. The sliding bar at the bottom allowed me to choose the date or year of the event.  After creating my timeline, I found few limitations with my account:

1. Free account provides full functionality  but we can create only one timeline.

2. We cannot embed it on our website or blog. (That's why I provided a link for mine)

3. We cannot activate 'group editing' that allows our friends and colleagues to add to our timelines.



So, in short, the free account is aimed primarily at giving people a  chance to try this software and its features with the hope that they will like it so much that they will want to upgrade their free accounts. There is also an Education Account ($100 a year) for individual school teachers and this account can be used only for educational purposes. The features of this particular account seem to be quite interesting. 

I think this tool has amazing potential for a classroom. Science teachers as well as learners can use it to make interactive timelines on topics such as evolution, extinction of variety of species,formation of earth, solar system, continental drift....... But the history teachers will find it more useful because the details which are found to be boring otherwise by the learners, can become fun with the usage of images, videos along with the text. I think this tool will help in making the history more lively subject. After all we educators have to keep this fact in our mind that our learners are Generation Z kids who love to create and want everything to be FUN!


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