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Timelines give students a visual, explorable sequence of events that turns a list of dates into a genuine narrative. Add events in any order — ChimeEdu sorts them chronologically for you automatically — then publish to your classroom and let students zoom, scrub, and tap their way through the content at their own pace. Every timeline is one of three types — Chronological, Date Range, or Manual — so the same activity covers everything from a unit on the American Revolution to the geological eras of deep time. All three types are available on every plan.

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Try it live

Scrub through one of each timeline type as a student would. Nothing you do is saved. Every example is a real activity in read-only mode, no account needed.

The Space Race — Chronological

Fourteen dated events from Sputnik to Apollo 17.

Geological Eras — Date Range

Deep time as duration-scaled spans, from the Hadean to the Holocene.

The Scientific Method — Manual

Seven ordered steps with no dates at all.

All live examples

One example for every activity type, with more on the way.

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Three Timeline Types

Pick the type from Timeline setup on the activity page (you can change it later — switching never deletes your events).

Chronological

The classic timeline: events are points in time, sorted and positioned by date automatically. Two optional toggles extend it far beyond calendar dates — Eras (BCE / CE) lets events sit in years like 44 BCE, and Deep time adds “millions / billions of years ago” units for geological and cosmic timelines. With both toggles off it behaves exactly as timelines always have.

Date Range

Events are periods rather than points — the Cambrian, the Renaissance, a dynasty — and each card’s length on the axis reflects the period’s duration. You control the visual scale (how many pixels one year, century, millennium, or million years takes up) from Timeline setup, with a live preview.

Manual

No time axis at all — events keep exactly the order you set, and you reorder them by hand with the up/down controls. A date or free-text label on each event is optional. Ideal for story sequences, process steps, or anything where your order matters more than the calendar.
A fourth type — Custom, for teacher-defined era systems like fictional calendars — is coming soon and appears greyed out in Timeline setup.

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What Makes Timelines Powerful

Automatic Chronological Sorting

Add events in whatever order suits you — ChimeEdu rearranges them by date automatically. No need to plan the build sequence in advance.

Rich Event Cards

Each event supports a title, date, image, description, and an optional location. Students get context, not just a date and a name.

Play Mode

Present the timeline to the class in auto-advance play mode. Events reveal in sequence — ideal for guided lessons and whole-class presentations.

Explore and Zoom

Students scrub through the timeline, zoom into a specific period, and tap any event for the full card — on desktop or mobile.

BCE, CE and Deep Time

Go far beyond calendar dates — events can sit in 44 BCE or 541 million years ago, and the axis scales to match. Built for ancient history, geology, and cosmology.

Published to Your Classroom

Publish directly to a classroom. Students open the activity from their feed — no link sharing, no separate logins required.

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Creating a Timeline

1

Open New Activity

From your teacher dashboard, click New Activity and select Timeline.
2

Add your events

Click Add Event to start building your timeline. Add events in any order — there is no need to enter them chronologically. ChimeEdu will sort them for you.
3

Fill in each event card

For every event, provide:
  • Title — the name of the event
  • When — what this asks for follows the timeline type: a calendar date (Chronological), a year with BCE/CE or a value in millions/billions of years when the era or deep-time toggles are on, a start and end (Date Range), or nothing at all (Manual — a date or label is optional)
  • Image — a photograph, illustration, or diagram (optional but highly recommended)
  • Description — formatted rich text giving students the context they need
  • Location — an optional place name or geographic reference
4

Save the timeline

The classroom is chosen from a dropdown when you create the activity — there is no separate publish step, and no draft state. The timeline is visible to that classroom from the moment it is created, and edits go live as you save them.
Build the deck in any order that suits your workflow — look up one event at a time, paste in notes as you go, or bulk-add events and fill in descriptions later. The timeline will always sort events by date automatically when students open it.

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Play Mode

Play Mode lets you present the timeline to the whole class in a guided, auto-advance format — perfect for lessons where you want to walk students through events in sequence rather than letting them explore independently. To activate Play Mode:
  1. Open the published timeline from your dashboard.
  2. Click the Play button in the activity toolbar.
  3. Events reveal one at a time in chronological order, advancing automatically or on your cue.
Use Play Mode at the start of a new topic to introduce the sequence before students explore on their own, or at the end of a unit as a review walkthrough. You can pause at any event to discuss it with the class before moving on.
You can attach Google Drive files — documents, slides, PDFs — to the timeline activity on Plus and Premium plans. Attachments belong to the activity as a whole and appear on its landing page, so they can’t be pinned to one specific event. If a source relates to a particular moment, say so in that event’s description.

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Let students build their own timeline

On Plus and Premium you can issue a timeline per student, so each one builds their own sequence of events rather than everyone editing the same timeline — or by group, where students placed into groups (A–Z) co-edit one timeline together. Events you added before issuing it stay visible to everyone as a shared starting layer, and a student’s PDF export contains their own work alongside it. A Students panel on the activity page tracks who has started. See Per-Student & Groups.

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Subject Ideas

Timelines are most obviously associated with history, but the format works anywhere sequence matters:
  • Trace the rise and fall of ancient civilisations, mapping key turning points along the way.
  • Chart the sequence of battles in a military campaign.
  • Build a political timeline of a revolution from first cause to resolution.
  • Map a century of social change through legislation, protest, and reform.