ChronoZoom is Closing Soon

ChronoZoom, a good tool for creating multilayer timelines, is shutting down on March 15th. Roland Saekow, ChronoZoom's co-founder, announced the closure through an email sent to ChronoZoom users. In the email Seakow announced that public projects will be archived and made available for download. Directions for making your projects public can be found in this Google Document.

ChronoZoom was a great tool for making timelines that displayed multiple layers so that viewers can see how events and eras overlap. If you're looking for another tool that can be used in that way, try Timeline JS.

Teaching With ChronoZoom - A Timeline of Almost Everything

A couple of years ago Microsoft launched an open source timeline tool called ChronoZoom. At that time ChronoZoom was an impressive interactive timeline of the history of the world. But that's all it was. Recently, I learned that ChronoZoom now allows students and teachers to create their own timelines. Timelines created in ChronoZoom can include multiple layers so that you can see how events and eras overlap. Within each section of your timeline multiple videos, images, and texts can be displayed.

The "zoom" part of the name ChronoZoom comes from the way in which you navigate the timelines by zooming-in and zooming-out on elements of the timeline. In that sense ChronoZoom's display will remind some users of the Prezi interface.

Applications for Education
Project ChronoZoom offers three sample lesson units that teachers can download for free. The units include templates for creating content on ChronoZoom. A tool like ChronoZoom could be great for students to use to create comparisons of what was happening in multiple parts of the world during the same era.

ChronoZoom - A Timeline of Almost Everything

ChronoZoom is a new timeline project from Microsoft Research. The primary goal of ChronoZoom is to provide a multimedia timeline of the history of the world from the dawn of time to today. The timeline is arranged according to themes and thresholds. Thresholds are eras and major developments in the history of the world. Within each threshold there are multiple videos, images, and texts about that time. ChronoZoom is an impressive display yet it is a little tricky to navigate at first (or at least it was for my click-happy fingers). You should watch this ChronoZoom tutorial from Microsoft to discover all of the functions of ChronoZoom.

I initially learned about ChronoZoom from Audrey Watters then did a little more reading about the ChronoZoom project on the Microsoft Research website. Microsoft describes ChronoZoom as a "an infinite campus in time."

Learn more about the ChronoZoom Project in the video below.

Applications for Education
About ten years ago someone gave me a monstrous-sized book simply titled The History of the World. While it is a nice book, it certainly has some significant gaps. ChronoZoom reminds me a bit of that book in digital form. ChronoZoom has the potential to be a great reference tool for history students and teachers. The option to view images and videos makes ChronoZoom a definite improvement over an giant, printed reference book. Like many reference sites that are slick in appearance, ChronoZoom has the potential to capture a student's attention and launch him or her into a series of quests for more information about a variety of topics.