For the first day in class studying Islam, after I gave a brief overview of Muhammad‘s life and how Islam originated in the Arabian Peninsula, I gave an assignment for students to make a timeline of Muhammad’s life that contained at least 8 major events in his life. His birth and death could be two of those events. They had several options for how to present the information: Xtimeline, TimeToast, Prezi, Pixton, or GoAnimate. All the students were familiar with Prezi, but most of them had never heard of the other electronic tools. The classes only had about 20-25 minutes to create an account on one of these sites, learn how to use it, research Muhammad’s life, create the outline, and post it to a class forum. If they didn’t finish in time, it was their homework, so of course; most of them finished in time. I only assigned 8 events in hopes that they would generate different outlines that can be shared and compared to learn more details, and this would also give them the opportunity to dig deeper into some of the events that interested them from my overview.
Here are a couple of the timelines that resulted from the students who chose to use Time Toast for this in-class assignment (sorry, they wouldn’t embed in Word Press):
As always on work generated from my World Religions class, feedback is much appreciated. Students check in on the comments periodically. For Apologetics, I’ll have them create their own blogs and I’ll share the best posts on Facebook to get traffic to their blog posts.
Andy Wrasman 
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