Timeline of Shakespeare's Life (created with Timetoast)

Timeline of Shakespeare's Life

The learning objectives of this activities were learning about Shakespeare´s life by using TimeToast to create a timeline.

My pupils have enjoyed this activity since they haven´t used this tool before and they have found it easy to use and motivating. One of the advantages of TimeToast is that they can edit their entries if they need to add a picture or a date. 

To set up the activity, I told them that we were going to celebrate World Book Day and commemorate Shakespeare´s birth and death. I explained that they had to search for information about this author and retain the most important dates of his life. They used the tablets to look for information (individually) and then we made groups of four pupils. They agreed which information wanted to include in their timelines and started to create it.

The problems that we had were the connection to the internet and the fact that my pupils are very dependent (their academic level is lower compared with pupils from other schools). For that reason, they only chose four or five important dates.

For the next time I would give them a text previously chosen by me, highlighting the most important ideas.

TimeToast helped me to achieve my learning objectives in different ways:

- Pupils felt motivated and engaged with this activity.

- They learnt a different way of organizing information (it will help them to study about any topic).

- As they made a “competition” with the other groups, they did their best to do their timeline.

- My students really learnt about Shakespeare´s life and his importance.

Finally, they did a short presentation of their timelines to the rest of the class, so they also developed the communicative competence. Now, they want to create another timeline for the next topic that we are going to see in class.