History is one of my passions in life, but I’ve never found timelines very interesting activities. This could all change with xtimeline, which helps you create a timeline on any subject and multiple users can add information and still images to an ongoing project. You can set up privacy settings to moderate who can contribute, view or comment on a timeline. Below is a photo of a Vietnam War timeline found the site, but I’m more interested in getting students to create their own. We are about to start looking at Decolonisation on Indochina in Senior History so this could be another useful tool for students.

Another open source timeline application is available as part of the MIT SIMILE project, but it looks much, much harder; in fact, it looks too hard.