Online Interactive Timeline to Improve Learning of History in School Education

For the school students of the post-digital generation, who have a strong visual thinking and attitude to operate in a highly interactive digital environment, learning from a classic textbook is an increasingly unattractive task. At the same time the self-preparation at home becomes even more important in the conditions of an emergency epidemiological situation, when it is necessary to quarantine students, whole classes, or completely close schools and move to online learning. But the modern student, due to the continuous online communication, is extremely prone to distraction, which extends towards the process of self-preparation. In the field of history education, the self-preparation is a serious challenge for students, as it requires the acquisition of factual knowledge (events, places, historical figures, artifacts) not only as a plain set of facts, but also structured in specific time intervals and related to cause-effect connections. To make learning an effective process, it is necessary to give to the students the opportunity to learn actively, in an interactive environment complementing the text resources with a rich set of images and videos in order to build visual reflections and visual associations to the basic concepts in the material. One of the possible solutions is the use of an online interactive timeline, which, combining the advantages of information technology and modern trends in history teaching to support not only the acquisition of knowledge in self-preparation, but also self-examination and application of acquired knowledge. In this paper, a web-based environment is discussed, which provides the teacher with the opportunity to construct online interactive timelines, for learning, for testing knowledge and for conducting competitions, with the help of which the school students can prepare their lessons more successfully at home.