TIMETOAST

 

             TIMETOAST ABOUT FEDERICO MAYOR ZARAGOZA

I work at IES Federico Mayor Zaragoza in Sevilla. Mayor Zaragoza was an important Spanish politician, educator, scientist and writer. He died in December 2024 and that's why the teachers at the school named after him have decided to honor his person in different ways. Each group of students has been requested to prepare one activity and the two groups of 1ESO have been told to create a timeline with the most important dates in Mayor Zaragoza's life. And I have been the teacher in charge of it. I've been lucky to be involved in this course and to come across with an application like Timetoast because this way the timelines that the students have prepared will be shown on the screen that we have in the school hall.

To do the activity I followed these steps, organized in two sessions:

Session 1

1- I asked the students if they knew who Federico Mayor Zaragoza was and why our school is named after him. We brainstormed ideas.

2- We read a text about Federico Mayor Zaragoza's life and important facts in his life. The text that we read had been prepared by one group of students at 3ESO. The students asked questions and I explained different things about him.

3- I explained to the students that in the next session they were going to prepare a timeline with the most important dates in Federico Mayor Zaragoza's life. I also explained that they were going to work in groups of 3 and that they were going to use an application called Timetoast. 

4- I explained to the students how Timetoast works.

Session 2

1- I brought different laptops to the classroom, one for each group of students. I had already opened an account in Timetoast in all the laptops so that students could start working with the application straight away.

2- In groups they had to look for the dates they were going to include in their timeline in the internet. 

3- After taking notes of the dates and the information they were going to use, they started writing their timeline.

4- When they finished the timeline, they had to copy the link in the Classroom task that I had already opened and send it to me.

The students have found this application very easy to use (although at the beginning they had problems with the type of information they had to include in each gap and they asked a lot of questions) and they have felt comfortable and happy using it, especially because it has been something new for them. The only thing I would change if I were to use this application again is making the students work in pairs and not in groups, especially with 1st-year students because the bigger amount of people there is in a group, the easier it is for the students to lose attention.

The use of Timetoast has helped me in the following ways:

- Get the students involved in the activities organized to commemorate the person of Federico Mayor Zaragoza in a more permanent way. The original idea was to create the timelines on paper and hang them on the walls at school, which would have meant their gradual disappearance. Having the timelines shown on a screen may be forever.

- Let the students know who the person after whom their school is named was.

- Let the students learn about new applications that they could use in other subjects in the future.

This is the link for one of the timelines:

https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/3151670