Check out these timeline templates for teachers, perfect for any school project or lesson plan, made with Office Timeline.
Last updated on October 28, 2022
I got an email from an industrious kid. He was a high school student preparing a history project and he wrote to us asking if we would give him and his classmates the premium edition of our timeline maker software. Good for him. He said they were struggling to build timeline templates because his school’s Gantt chart tool was “complicated and ugly.”
I wrote to him and he responded that they needed something that was more graphical, template driven, easier to use and something that could be presented in a simple way. It got me thinking of the value of timeline makers and timeline templates as education tools.
So, I wrote this blog post to explore how Office Timeline can be used in schools – and I included helpful details like use cases, benefits, and free templates you can download and customize.
I was interested because I had just recently done bit of family history homework on a timeline. My family seems to have moved around over the past couple centuries, and there were some diligent family historians recording this along the way. So I had a pretty good log of when and where my ancestors were. I turned this information into a timeline and found it to be a really cool visual tool for understanding my origins.
Plotting my ancestor’s history in our timeline maker had me simultaneously thinking about the events and circumstances of their day. So then I plotted the significant historical events of the time on top of my family’s timeline template. That was very educational.
Correlating the major historical events with my ancestor’s timeline made learning history personal. I spent time researching each event as I was entering it into the timeline maker. The tool rendered all of this into a beautiful, visual PowerPoint slide, which I shared with my siblings, cousins and parents. They loved it because it was very visual, therefore easy for them to consume and digest. I think the high school kid got this (smart kid!) and that is why he wanted our timeline maker.
Since my experience of learning was richer with a graphical timeline maker, I assumed I would see plenty of educators in our database. I ran some queries to check this and can confirm there has been considerable use of Office Timeline by educators, academics and historians. Much like my experience and the high school kid’s, these folks also understand that engaging their audiences in a visual way creates a more effective learning environment.
There also has been significant usage by students. I corresponded with a few of them and it turns out they are using it to make timeline templates across every subject imaginable. For example, political science timelines, historical timelines, science project timelines, one on the history of manuscripts, one on reducing lighting consumption of a corridor, financial forecasting timelines, and even a timeline template that plotted the important milestones of a multi-national corporation.
The net is that graphical timeline slides can be an interesting way to supplement learning and a timeline maker or timeline templates can be powerful teaching tools.
Office Timeline is an add-in for Microsoft PowerPoint that helps you create visual timelines for project management, planning, and teaching. The software is easy to use and can help teachers with lesson and curricula planning, as well as school management and administration. It’s a great tool for students who want to quickly create custom timelines of historical periods.
There are several advantages to having a timeline maker built into PowerPoint. Many teachers and students are already familiar with using PowerPoint, so they start from a baseline of understanding when they adopt Office Timeline. Additionally, having the timeline maker built into PowerPoint saves users the trouble of having to download or learn how to use a new program.
This short video shows how Office Timeline can help you create impressive PowerPoint timeline slides in just a few seconds:
