On the surface, Doceri is a powerful way to get mobile in your classroom, record lessons and create flipclass screencast videos. But dig a little deeper, and the power of Doceri really comes alive.

The Doceri Timeline is what sets it apart from every other whiteboard or screencasting app. Using the Doceri timeline, you can edit your project, organize and set the flow of your presentation with stop points and create animations that will engage your students.

Here in Part one, we’ll just introduce you to the elements of the Doceri timeline. (Part two covers editing)

Where is it?

The Doceri Timeline is tucked away at the top of your screen just under the tool bar. when you swipe it down, a whole new control center is at your fingertips.

Doceri was designed for creating hand-written or hand-drawn lessons and presentations. Each stroke of your finger or stylus and each insertion of an image or cut and pasted drawing element is recorded as a ‘step’ in the Doceri timeline, so you can go back and edit your project. When you open the timeline, you’ll see that the new page and previous page controls have moved from the edges of the screen to the center of the Timeline, alongside the controls to move ahead or back step-by-step.

When you first open the timeline on a new project, it will be blank of course. But after you’ve created a multi-page project or lesson with inserted images and stop points, you’ll see blue squares, red dots and white circles with numbers in them. The blue squares indicate where images have been inserted.

To add a new page to the project, use the white ‘New page” icon on the right side of the timeline. The inserted pages are indicated in the timeline as circles with the page number inside.

The red stop points are used to create the flow of your lesson or presentation, and to create animations.

The resulting lesson or presentation can be advanced using the advance controls at the far ends of the timeline to move through sections at a time, or the play button can be used to show each stroke sequentially. The play back speed can be set, and even changed during play back.

Here’s a reference diagram for all of the timeline controls. You can access this from with the app by pressing the question mark just to the left of the playback speed control.

You’ll really realize the power of the Doceri timeline when you get into editing, and animations. Part 2 will cover editing with the timeline.