DocsTeach vs History Timeline

DocsTeach is a free interactive teaching website built around primary sources in the National Archives holdings. Its collection includes thousands of letters, photographs, speeches, posters, maps, and videos. Teachers can create activities by selecting a tool and sources, then customizing instructions. Activity formats include document analysis, discussion, compare and contrast, zoom and crop, sequencing, mapping, and interpreting data. Students can submit and save responses for a teacher to view in My Students’ Responses, or send responses by email. Teachers can share activities to Google Classroom, where students can turn in their work through its button. For lessons using other materials, teachers can upload JPG, PNG, GIF, or JPEG documents and images up to 8 MB per file. The redesigned site supports exploring and creating activities on computers and tablets, and students can turn in work through the DocsTeach App for iPad. A free account costs nothing and allows users to create, save, and share activities and primary sources, and access hundreds more educator activities. Creating an account requires a name, email address, and password.

History Timeline is desktop software for creating and exploring interactive timelines about history. Its time-zoom interface ranges from very long historical spans to events measured in yoctoseconds. Users can begin with an Excel template, import data as CSV, and add events, icons, hyperlinks, styles, and event hierarchies. Timeline items can link to online articles and original documents. The site provides timelines covering world and United States history, geology, science and technology, biographies, and art history. Finished timelines can be saved as JPG or PNG images, or printed across multiple pages with configurable paper size, orientation, and margins. Online display and website embedding, including customized timelines, are available by request. The software runs on Windows 11, 10, or 8 and macOS 10.15 or later, with at least 2 GB RAM and 400 MB free storage. A free version has limited features and content; Personal costs $24.50 a year, Professional $49.50 a year, and Perpetual 119.50 USD one-time.