Dipity, learning in a temporal context

Dipity, is a website tool for creating timelines. It allows you to select the most important information on a topic and organize it in chronological order.

Dipity is multimedia and interactive: it permits integrating audio, video, images, texts, links, locations on maps and timestamps. Depending on the level of visibility and edition that you choose for them and whether or not you permit comments on the events, the timelines can serve as a forum where the users generate, analyze and share contents.

The events are added manually or are imported after a web search using Dipity itself. You can look for them on Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and GoogleNews; illustrate them with images from Flickr and Picasa; make them more dynamic with videos from YouTube and Vimeo or with music from Last.fm and Pandora (not available in Spain); insert blogs from Blogger, WordPress and Tumblr, send messages with Twitter and Friendfeed and integrate Yelp, Digg, Delicious, or an RSS feed. Finally the HTML code created for the timeline permits it to be embedded in any web page.

Dipity timelines can be configured with several presentations so that you can see them as a timeline, flipbook, list or map.

Because of all these characteristics, its easy to use and attractive interface and its potential as a collaborative tool, Dipity is perfect for use in the classroom, in multiple disciplines and at all educational levels. With this software the pupils can check how the events they order and organize follow each other in a dynamic manner, putting their knowledge on a timeline.

Several eTwinning projects have used this tool:

• In Researching the Twelve Labours of Hercules, the pupils used Dipity to document the references to the twelve labours of Hercules which existed in television series, cartoons, musical videos, etc. The description of each one of the resources facilitated their understanding of this research and collection task.

• To explain the most important events in the history of Madrid from its founding in the 17th Century … what better than to use Dipity! This is what the pupils working on European cities, past and present did and found that it was a very enjoyable way to present the city to their European partners.

Dipity is also useful for documenting an eTwinning project, like they are doing in ICT4U. In this case it has served both to present the activity plan to be followed and to show chronologically the material produced, giving an idea of the beginning and progress of the project. In this way the tool serves for the evaluation and monitoring of the project, with an ordered presentation of the results, so that a check can be made on whether the planned material has been produced and the stated objectives attained.

Dipity is useful whenever it is necessary to have a timeline for the data: planning, monitoring of activities, evaluations … etc., or learning in a temporal context (historical events).

With its attractive presentation of the contents and the connection to multiple online ICT tools, Dipity foments work which is collaborative and well planned. If you want to know more about using Dipity as a didactic resource, don’t hesitate to consult this article from the ITE Technological Observatory and this tutorial by Francisco Javier López Iglesias.

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