The use of Omeka and Timeline

Recently in class, we have been playing around with the Omeka application. I’ve learned that you don’t want to think of Omeka as an open blog post to vent your ideas, but rather, look at Omeka as an online museum which contains artifacts. With playing around with Omeka I started to make an online museum about my life and showing how I got here today. As I was doing this in class, I started to think about how I could use these ideas and connect it to my final project in the class which uses the Knight Lab timeline tool. Both of these tools can be used in the same way, but they are very different applications.

When I think of Omeka now I think about it as a timeline about someone’s life history. But you don’t see the timeline, rather, you see the exhibits which can be like a timeline. You can click through the different pages and see the history of that person’s life. This is exactly what I am doing with my final project on the timeline website. My group is doing the history of how the book Walden by Henry David Thoreau came to be. We are doing what is shown in Omeka but in our project, you can actually see a picture of a timeline with a point on it explaining what he did at this date/ time period. I feel that these two tools are connected. If I use my Omeka website as an example, I started putting together an online museum of my life and the history of how I got to SUNY Geneseo. I could grab all of these pages that I started to make and put it all on the timeline website. I could start with the day I was born and add captions explaining each event I would decide to put in there. On the timeline tool, you can also add as many pictures as you want. One difference between the two is that you can pinpoint when the exact event was on the timeline, and in Omeka you would put the date either in the caption or as the title of that exhibit. But it is the same story that can be told on different tools.

As I have mentioned before; I am studying to be a teacher. After learning about these applications, I found that this would be a great project that I could assign in my classroom or use in class to do the history of an author in literacy, or of how electricity was invented in science. I feel that these tools can be used in all subjects and not just in history class. This is also a great way to get the students excited about researching a time period, event, or person and then have them explain it to their other classmates. These could be fun projects that aren’t the same activities over and over again. Another way that I thought I could use this is to use it as a project rather than have them take a test; it is still testing what they learned but they don’t have to get as stressed about taking an exam. I also think it’s good to mix up giving students tests and projects because then they can focus on learning rather than just memorizing, I know I enjoyed this mixing up of testing growing up.

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