Students identify and/or place events, actions, or other elements on a physical or digital timeline.
This method helps students map events, visualise time perspectives, create overviews, and identify patterns.
Define—or have students decide—what they want to explore using a timeline.
This could be historical events, a product’s lifecycle, a person’s life story, a user’s experience, or a novel’s plot progression.
Distribute physical or digital cards with events, actions, or other items for students to place on the timeline — or let students find and choose what they want to add themselves.
Students arrange the events, actions, etc., in order on a physical or digital timeline. They can add dates, quotes, facts, or other relevant details.
Students reflect on, for example:
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How do the events influence each other?
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Are there unexpected connections or trends?
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What can we learn from the development?
Didactic tips
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Students can create an online timeline where they add videos, articles, or images.
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Using the Timeline method, they can make predictions about future developments, or with the Timeline method, extrapolate trends from the timeline.
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Students can compare multiple timelines (e.g., two countries, two technologies, or two historical periods).
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They can add colour codes to show connections between events or use the Timeline method to identify relevant categories and patterns.
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Students can also create a “living timeline” by physically lining up in chronological order and presenting their assigned events.
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As a conclusion, the class can discuss how different interpretations of the sequence might arise and what causes these differences.