See how some students have used the ClioVis to better understand class material.

Click on this student-built group project to see how they used the platform to better understand Native American history. As the students note, this timeline illustrates: “American expansion and conflict in the West between 1836 and 1890.” All the information comes from the textbook the students were using, Colin Calloway’s First Peoples textbook. Use the arrow keys on your computer to move the timeline, and click on events or connections to see the content. Or, put the timeline in presentation mode to see the timeline in a different format.

Jesse Ritner, an Instructor of an introductory U.S. History course at UT Austin explains how he had his students use the software: “In my intro to U.S. History: pre-1865 class, I split the class into groups of five or six students.  Each week, the students got together to put about 15 nodes on the timeline and made 15 or more connections between those events based on the material we were studying. 

The same groups would meet each week to build a timeline. This exercise extended over the semester.  Each student made one video in the course that covered approximately four lectures worth of material.  In these videos, instead of simply recounting each event, I asked the students to explain how these events fit into larger themes in the class.  In my case, the themes were the social and legal construction of race and gender, the process of settler colonialism, and environmental changes.  These videos both allowed me to check how well individual students were doing in the project, and making them also allowed the students a way to trace changes over multiple lectures, in a free-form manner, that allowed them to think creatively, without the limiting structure of an essay.”

You can watch them explain their work in the videos below:

Timeline Video – Introduction to Colonial America based on Class themes.

Timeline Video – Introduction to Colonization and Indigenous peoples.