Jennifer Bolton is married with two boys, both special needs. She is the owner of the Special Needs in Homeschooling. Jennifer uses free resources for teaching whenever she can, to keep her boys’ interests and to tailor their learning experiences to their individual learning styles and special needs.

Don’t you loathe that time of night when you are done with your day and have to journal it? That boring, repetitive journal that reads like Ben Stiller is narrating:

• short vowel a
• went to park
• wrote history essay
• multiplication tables

Our editor Jennifer Gray sent me some websites to look over and OurStory not only caught my eye, but I’m in love with it!

“…OurStory helps users capture, share and preserve life stories, photos and video, easily organized into a visual timeline. Many customers use OurStory as an online journal, online diary or as a blog. Users can choose how and with whom to share their life stories through email and/or on their personal timeline. OurStory helps preserve moments and share memories in a lasting digital format online, or create hardcover books and DVD’s to save forever.”

OurStory is a FREE online tool with an optional premium service. I find the free part of OurStory very usable but with the premium service you can get unlimited profiles under a single login (good for parents to monitor timelines created by their children), additional privacy options, and a rich text editor for dressing up your fonts, colors and pictures. OurStory founders are in the process of adding more premium features in the near future.  I am going to wait and see what new features they are going to add before deciding to sign up for premium services.  The premium service is $39.95 per year.

The video below will give you an overview of OurStory:

I chose to share our home learning journal (below).  I only have a few entries up so far. My boys and I gathered around and picked our favorite stories to put on the timeline to try OurStory. We had so much fun that we ended up spending three hours reading other people’s timelines and creating our own!

Start your own timeline at OurStory.com

I’m one of those people who are overly safe on the Internet, so making sure OurStory was safe was extremely important to me. With each entry you make, you can choose the privacy settings - “public”, “only me” or “only my connections”  (the premium service offers additional options).  I chose to make my story public so I could share it with you. Whenever I had entries with information I didn’t want to share for privacy reasons, I picked the ‘only me’ option. You can pick and choose for each entry you make, sharing only what you want to share and with the people you choose to share it with!

OurStory allows you to use photos they have on their site or upload your own (limit of 6 photos per ’story’).  You can also upload a video of that special field trip moment and keep it with your journal!  I think this is the best feature on the website.  Another feature I like is that I can print my timeline in a book or archive it on CD.  And OurStory is completely online so it won’t get lost if your computer crashes!

One of the things I was wondering when I signed up was, ‘would I be able to post past events?’ and yes! I can! I will be going through my private journal since September and adding everything to this site. I can post as far as back as time will allow and as far into the future as I would like. It’s nice to have a place to write out the goals I want my children to learn and when that day comes, there it is. I can see if my child reached the goals or if more work is needed.

Even if you don’t sign up to create your own timeline, take the time to gather around the computer and check out some of these interactive historical timelines:

Do you remember World War II? I remember…

World War II timeline written by Huang Zhong

Timeline of Women in Sports

OurStory offers a personal view of stories written by veterans, history buffs, or student writing assignments. It’s a chance to read a story in history from someone who has been there or offering a different view!

If you do sign up, please leave a comment and let us know! Share any new ideas on ways you think this site can be used!