A Time Line with TimeToast

 Last week, my students used TimeToast to create a timeline about a British or American band or artist. The main objective of this activity is to read, understand and summarize a brief text by selecting the most relevant information. At the same time, we had the chance to review the past simple –especially irregular verbs!

Creating a timeline with this tool makes them focus on the essential facts of the text and therefore work on their mediation skills. At the same time, they are creating a new, visual product with images and data, which is always rewarding.

First, I chose and adapted some texts and biographies of famous UK and USA bands and artists. In order to facilitate understanding, most of these texts were taken from Wikipedia in simple English, as language is clearer and easier to understand. I added a picture and removed some of the verbs in past simple, placing gaps and brackets instead.

Then, I let students work individually: they had to read the texts and fill in the gaps with the correct form of the verb. After that, they had to find another student with the same text (I managed to form heterogeneous pairs) and read it together.

Finally, I guided them through TimeToast (it took a while for them to sign up, since their digital skills are not extraordinary…) and I told them to create the timeline with the most important facts about the band or artist they had just read about. Years and dates were used as markers to help them.   

During the activity, students were really focused on the task and collaborated all the time. They really liked the option of including pictures and they felt quite happy to see how their work was transformed into a visual product. Although they haven’t finished yet (work in progress!), the results were quite good:

David Bowie

The Beatles

 Spice Girls

I would definitely love to repeat this task with other groups and levels. Still, I think I need to explain more carefully how to summarize information and transform long sentences into short ones, since some of the students weren’t able to do it correctly (they would just write single words from the text, without a proper sentence structure).

So, TimeToast has proven to be a great and fun tool in order to:

-          Make students enjoy reading and working on a text.

-          Teach them to select and summarize the most important ideas in a text by placing them chronologically.

-          Revise grammar and learn new vocabulary about music and art.