Thinglink allows you to take an image and link other information to it. You can use the search box inside of Thinglink to find YouTube or Vimeo clips, SoundCloud or Spotify audio clips, Amazon books, items for sale on Etsy or Ebay, public photos on Flickr or Instagram and Social media like Facebook or Twitter and much more. Click here to see a Slide Share to explain more. If you know of a great website you can click anywhere on the picture and link it. You can even just include some interesting information in a text box to share.
I can see endless possibilities of how to use this with students. The first thing that came to mind was when I used to collaborate with the art teacher and the students created a report to share information about their environmental issue they airbrushed or artist the interpreted on a birdhouse. With this resource we could take a digital picture of the artwork and students could link information they found on the Internet and even to a Google Doc version of their typed report and tada it is an all digital report to share!
Another idea I had would be for students doing a biography report as we did in 6th grade Language Arts. The students could find a picture of their famous person then link videos of the person giving a speech, an online encyclopedia or magazine article with more information about the person, books about the person, a recipe they like to eat, or even a song they sing or like and a Google Doc of their written report. Another tada for a digital sharing piece!
If you do a million dollar scrapbook in Math you could use a picture collage site like Smilebox, Photovisi , Fotor, or PiZap to create a collage of all your items then load to Thinglink and create links to online catalogs and websites with prices and descriptions of the items.
I could also see students using it for ecosystem presentations by finding a picture layout of their assigned ecosystem and labeling the different parts with information about why they are important to the life cycle in the system. Or adding videos of animals that live in the ecosystem and websites for environmental websites to protect the area.
Students studying different cultures around the world could find a picture of a celebration in that culture and link to videos or other photos of the celebration, items purchased to celebrate, websites about customs that happen during the celebration, and social media posts from people during the celebration.
Students studying advertising could pick a picture of a product and link to commercials, the products website, information on the history of the product, customer reviews of the product, and stock or price information about the product.
Students reading a book could draw or pose for a picture of the characters in a scene from the book and link to video clips of book trailers (or make their own to link to), other photos that depict happenings in the book, sounds or songs that go with the mood of the book, merchandise the characters might have, or reviews of the book.
Here is an example of the first one I created for a teaching tool to use with the Dewey Decimal System mural in the library.
Before you close the page - share some of your ideas for using Thinglink with your students....
