Eagle-eyed readers will remember I've already written a post about the wonders of Google Spreadsheets, but here's something else you can do with them that I hope you'll appreciate - creating interactive timelines.
The best example of this is a project I've been working on that went live today, the University of Brighton Student Experience Timeline.
There is a good introduction to the rationale behind the timeline on the university Student Services website. It's overall aim is to provide a tool to help staff understand the student lifecycle in order to best plan their own activities, and to direct them to relevant resources at key pressure points. The events can be filtered or searched and each item on the timeline can be clicked for more details, links and an image.
The recipe for producing this timeline is a Google spreadsheet, a bit of html, and links to some magic scripts (from MIT's Simile Project). I learned how to do all this from Brian Croxall's excellent 'Build Your Own Interactive Timeline' tutorial. If you want to do this, I suggest you start by watching Brian's video which gives you a good overview of what we are building here!
This timeline won't work embedded in Blogger or in a Blackboard item because of the way it calls in links. Sorry. You need to create a proper web page for this one. Also it doesn't like Win7/IE8 and I don't know why, but I've put a javascript browser check on the webpage which suggests the user switches to Firefox.
I'm very impressed with the results - an impressive interactive tool, that can be easily updated and added to by non-technical users by just adding rows to a spreadsheet.
1 comments:
Katie. Nice timeline. Very colourful! If you like creating timelines, we'd love it if you took a look at our timeline software: www.tiki-toki.com. Thanks. Alex
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