Benefits of Timelines for Teaching 

Every student won’t use the same techniques and strategies to learn. Some students can read a block of text and remember the key points, while others won’t get a single phrase put into their memory. For these students, visual learning aids like timelines will come in handy to understand and retain information. A timeline is a graphic representation of information, such as historical events, usually in a linear format. Increasingly, more education professionals swear by the benefits of timelines for teaching. Let’s see why.

Timelines are a universal learning tool

If the information is presented in words, only a person who understands the language can grasp the concepts explained in the text. While these infographics do use text, they also incorporate visual symbols and imagery. These are components than anyone can understand, even someone who has trouble with a particular language. Given this benefit, they come in handy across different subjects, because everyone understands visuals and the concept of time in the same way. If you have a student in a classroom who has a language barrier, they can come in handy.

Help organise facts 

Visual learners would prefer them to organise facts using different categories and hierarchies. Unlike notetaking, a graphic offers the creator the chance to use several design tools. You can highlight, underline, and insert different symbols to make sense of facts the way you want.

Condense information

During a class lesson, a teacher is bound to talk quite a bit and provide a boatload of information. It can be hard for students to discern the essential points from the trivial ones. By using a visual resource, teachers can emphasise and stress more on the key facts, making sure their students leave the classroom with the right takeaways.

They are scaleable

You can create timelines on a micro scale or a macro scale, providing students with a new context for events, especially when it comes to history. As an example, a history teacher could create a timeline spanning a few days, focusing on the Battle of Normandy. This would show how events progressed and changed the course of one individual battle. On the other hand, the teacher could make a timeline spanning several years, looking at the entire Second World War and how the Battle of Normandy helped shape the rest of the conflict.

Show non-linear connections 

Our general impression of timelines is that they show linear relationships between events to provide a basic understanding of them. However, these graphics can have much more depth using different spatial arrangements and colour schemes. One timeline can branch off from an event on another timeline, showing the more complex nature of how separate incidents are related and dependent.

By organising information visually and showing these non-linear connections, these displays provide context to history, showing how events, people, locations and other elements are interconnected.

Develop student skills

While teachers can adopt timelines to help students in the classroom, students themselves can create them for homework assignments. They can then develop other education skills in the process. As an example, visual aids can require citations and references, teaching students the correct and appropriate protocols to improve their research skills.

The infographics also help students in debates and arguments. By showing how time and space changed history or opinion, students can use the infographic to demonstrate their point of view on a given matter, developing their reasoning and communication skills.

Takeaways

There are multiple benefits of timelines for teaching, and these benefits go both ways. They help teachers convey their lesson to students, and they help students understand what is presented to them. By most regards, they are a mutually beneficial tool. As long as a topic can be discussed in relation to space and time, these learning supplements will be extremely useful learning resources. While the consensus is that they’re helpful only in the history class, a deeper knowledge of them will show otherwise. They can be used to indicate the changing cultural discourse on a topic, or even a seemingly complicated cooking recipe that takes a day.

To make a timeline easily and efficiently, take a look at our app that simplifies the entire process. Find out how the app works here to get started.