Dipity is an extremely creative tool which is easy to use and extremely engaging. I can see how students would love to create timelines in this format. Dipity allows for more interesting and innovative ideas to occur and allows you to explore outside the box of just Microsoft programmes, such as Excel or Word. The other idea that I love is that you can embed your ideas onto the web for everyone else to view and comment. Students would get a sense of pride towards their work and this helps them to see that doing the activities are useful and meaningful in a real-world context.
The learning purposes for the Dipity timeline, I created above, could be to get students to add to and create their own Dipity timeline by finding more information on the author of the book, what other books were in the series and why it was turned into a blockbuster movie?
SWOT analysis of Dipity in my Teaching Context
Strengths | Weaknesses |
· Embed onto the web · Timelines are engaging and can be used at the high order thinking end of the scale · Easy to use and create · Upload images, video, text and audio · Interactive – much more exciting then those boring history lessons where you had to jot down important events which you had to regurgitate in tests · Appealing to a range of learning styles · Can be used as a collaborative tool with other students · Develops research and with the incorporation of image and sound engages students to search further for information, and develop critical thinking skills | · Students may just add dates and images, a remembering thinking strategy without using complex thinking skills · Carried away with formatting the timeline rather than adding relevant content |
Opportunities | Threats |
· Freedom to format their own timeline · Freedom to express their own content · Creativity can prevail · Innovative ideas are introduced · Multimodal ways of expressing dates and text with image, video and audio | · Copyright legislation |
I would like to add to this posting the use of one other digital tool I researched this week:
Skype is another great digital tool to break down the walls of the classrooms and interact with overseas classrooms. One can have interviews with expert authors on the other side of the world.
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