For my Visualization Project, I ended up created an interactive timeline on the History of Social Media using Knight Labs. My original Inquiry blog topic was on Art and Identity: Is Identity given or created? In my last blog post, I dove into this topic and started to connect it to the topic of social media, so I wanted to create a visualization based on this subtopic.

To view my project click HERE!

As an art teacher, visualizations are typically part of a lesson. I personally loved to research all of these interactive platforms, which I will definitely put in my teacher resource book. I decided to choose the interactive timeline for this project because it seemed to be the best fit to present information on the topic of social media. I thought it was a nice way to share information dealing with dates along with adding photos and videos in a fun way! I think using this platform would engage students in a way a textbook or plain article would not. It gives them a visual of what order events happened along with time in between events. It also gives the teacher a chance to insert related videos or photos, which are always helpful in learning.

Overall, this project was helpful in giving me ideas on how to create more interesting and interactive lessons. Teaching students information definitely doesn’t have to be boring and straight from a textbook. It can be fun, personal, and creative! Being in the art education already, this is something I have thankfully learned early on. This project though has taught me that I don’t even have to show a boring basic powerpoint to introduce a lesson. There are SO many other options out there in creating a lesson to engage students and help them learn in a meaningful way.