History teachers have long asked students to create timelines to help conceptualize and understand historical events. Student-created timelines were often limited by the space they occupied. Often teachers would have students focus on a few events and ask them to write very small on their notebook paper to squeeze in events. Clever teachers invested in rolls of butcher paper or banner paper to have students create long timelines. But thanks to today's web designers, timelines are no longer limited in space. Using free timeline builders online allows students to see concepts over time without the constraints of paper and a straightedge.

I have always liked using timelines in my classroom to help students see change over time and help students remember chronology (an oft-heard complaint for students of history).

My students have made standard social, political, and economic timelines of eras of U.S. history in preparation for exams. My students have also created the popular timeline of events leading up the Civil War. I thought myself a clever teacher using large rolls of butcher paper for these timelines to maximize the number of events included and student participation. It was not until I sat down to read the new National Curriculum Standards for Social Studies put out by the National Council for the Social Studies that I saw another way for students to create timelines. "Learners demonstrate understanding by using graphic software to create a timeline depicting a scientific idea of the evolution of a technological innovation, and predicting how that idea or technology might develop in the next 10–20 years." (NCSS 57) With this, I began my search for digital timeline-building websites.

A quick search revealed lots of possibilities for creating timelines online for free. I had to spend a little time playing with each one to find the site that would best work for my needs and students. There are sites that are better tailored to elementary students. There are also those that are more powerful, but less user-friendly. This site provides a nice review of the various digital timeline sites available for free. My project required students to create events with years BCE and CE, which limited the sites I could use and may be a consideration in your site choice. You may also wish to consider what types of multimedia features you would like students to be able to embed in their timelines. Some sites offer the ability to embed pictures and videos. Most timeline-building sites allow users to embed their timelines in blogs or other websites, making sharing timelines easy.

Adapting the product recommended by NCSS, I asked students to create a timeline showing the impact of the Scientific Revolution on a specific field of modern science. To go one step further, students were to make some predictions about future developments in that field (i.e. chemistry, geology, meteorology, etc.). My students quickly caught on to the user interface for the timeline builder and in three 45-minute class periods had researched and created a timeline specific to their field of modern science. You can see an example of one student's timeline here. With more time and practice, I believe that my students will become better at creating richer timelines. After they had created their timelines, students were able to view each others' and comment on them. Ultimately, we created a class timeline merging events from each student's timeline to see the broader impact of the Scientific Revolution.

Digital timelines allow teachers greater flexibility and creativity in assigning timeline activities to students over the old paper timelines. They also allow students to collaborate in a way that fosters chronological thinking and in-depth analysis of eras in history. I hope that you will experiment with digital timelines and share the creative ways you use them in your classroom.

For those of you who couldn’t make it to Chicago on January 7 for our workshop, “Teaching the Past in a Digital World: New Perspectives for History Education,” at the American Historical Association (AHA) Annual Meeting, you not only missed the balmy 50 degree temperatures (not bad for Chicago in January!), but also quite a few great resources worth sharing. Here’s a recap:

After a welcome by Anne Hyde of Colorado College, I provided a brief overview of Teachinghistory.org. With about half the audience already familiar with the site, I was able to get everyone up to speed and highlight a few new features, including the newly unveiled Favorites tool, as well as the new Spotlight Pages. Responding to a commonly asked question about world history, I highlighted the many teaching materials and best practices that can apply to all historical topics, whether you teach the American or the French Revolution.

Fitting for Chicago, Dr. Daniel Graff from the University of Notre Dame introduced ideas and resources to help teachers integrate labor history into their teaching. He provided a packet of primary sources that participants analyzed in small groups and then discussed as a whole group. The workshop helped me see new classroom connections for bringing labor history into discussions about slavery, women’s history, and the civil rights movement.

My colleague, Rwany Sibaja, presented an interactive workshop with handouts on teaching American history with digital tools. He introduced the participants to Vimeo, Prezi, and Animoto among others. I always learn new things from my Teachinghistory.org colleagues (Rwany introduced me to Prezi last year) and you can check out some of his write-ups on various tools in our Tech for Teachers section.

Next up, Paul Kolimas of Homewood Flossmoor High School moderated a session with fellow Homewood Flossmoor High School teachers Jeff Treppa and John Schmidt. They offered a presentation on a “new school” approach to the classic research paper. It was interesting to see how their techniques related back to Teachinghistory.org’s emphasis on historical thinking skills. The audience had lots of questions, so they definitely hit on a popular topic.

Molly Myers of Lindblom Math and Science Academy then turned our attention back to digital tools, focusing her talk on how she uses technology for the 3 c’s: collaboration, communication, and community building. Her presentation helped me see a lot of new possibilities and I particularly loved hearing how Molly turned to Twitter to get input from teachers on #SSChat about how they use digital tools for her presentation.

We ended the workshop with an inspiring talk by Patricia Nelson Limerick, vice-president of the AHA’s Teaching Division and professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She titled her talk, “Facing Down Fear: Innovation, Experimentation, and Adrenaline in the Teaching of History.” The talk lived up to the title. She spoke about the importance of trying new things, even things you might fear such as using new technology. She also talked about the importance of personal connections in the classroom (and in life) and raised the question of whether digital tools enhance or distract us from these personal links. She graciously agreed to write up her talk for Teachinghistory.org, so look for her post in the coming weeks.

So from adrenaline to Vimeo, we covered a lot of ground in Chicago. Our next stop? Kansas City for the National Council for History Education conference, March 22-24. Hope to see you there!

In 1992, Congress passed Public Law 102.42, permanently designating May as Asian Pacific American Month. Just as with other heritage months, May is barely enough time to scratch the surface of the many strands of history the month memorializes. In May 2009, Teachinghistory.org suggested some places to start digging. Continue to dig this year, with more suggestions.

Modern history textbooks now recognize the internment of Japanese Americans in prison camps during World War II, and its violation of the U.S. understanding of citizenship has increasingly become a core strand in narratives about the war. Digital archives offer rich collections of primary sources related to the internments. Many of these sources feature children, making them a natural choice for drawing students into the story of history. Others focus on law, press, and the choices adults made both during and after the internment years.

• Students describe their own experiences of internment in the University of Arkansas's Land of (Un)Equal Opportunity. World War II-era high-school students' essays, poems, and other documents record the thoughts of modern students' historical peers.
• Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project's archives preserve more than 900 hours of oral history interviews on Japanese American experiences, as well as 10,830 photographs, documents, and newspapers. Browsing them by topic reveals sources on little-covered aspects of the World War II era, such as the experiences of Japanese Hawaiians.

The lives and experiences of all groups in the U.S. overlap and intertwine with each other, and no group's history exists in isolation. Japanese American history didn't begin and end with World War II, nor did it exist in a vacuum. Enter the keywords "registration certificate 1942" into the search box at the Columbia River Basin Ethnic History Archive for a primary source that captures the complicated nature of identity, perception, and categorization in U.S. history. Remember that Chinese and Japanese Americans are not the only groups represented by this artifact—consider what groups' views motivated the creation of this source.

• The Library of Congress houses many more sources on one period of Chinese American experience in its collection Chinese in California, 1850-1925.
• Promise of Gold Mountain: Tucson's Chinese Heritage, created by the University of Arizona, explores the lives of Chinese Americans in an Arizona city.
• For a look into another Chinese American community, the Maine Memory Network preserves images of life in Maine and its changes over time.

Groups within the U.S. have often banded together based on shared identities to push for change. The Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project tells the story of Filipino Americans and unionism in the Seattle canning industry.

World War II, the Korean War, and the whole span of U.S. international history and involvement (and lack of involvement) can shift when seen from different perspectives. The University of Southern California's Korean American Digital Archive includes photographs and documents related to international events—and to daily life.

Both a Pacific Island and a U.S. state, Hawaii has a unique position for Asian Pacific American Month. Many different cultures come together here, including Native Hawaiian, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, among others, and it is one of only four states where non-Hispanic whites do not form the majority. Sources on the history of many of these groups can be found in the digital archives of the University of Hawai'i at Manoa.

These resources touch on only a scattering of the many Asian American and Pacific American groups represented in the history of the U.S.—and only a scattering of the resources available to teachers. Comment and tell us what you use to teach Asian Pacific American history this month—and the rest of the year. What books, lesson plans, films, primary sources, and other materials have their place in your classroom and curriculum?