ThingLink: Interactive Images for Instruction

Details

Activity Description

Students access a teacher-created ThingLink to learn, practice, or review vocabulary with images, text, video, audio, or links to Web content. Students can also be assigned to use ThinkLink to create their own interactive images for a variety of class projects.

Preparation

1. Be sure that the site is not blocked at your school before having students use it.
2. Make sure that speaker volume is set at an appropriate level.
3. Practice using the site to be familiar with its navigation.
4. In the Getting Started document, there are various examples. You can also browse for another ThinkLink scene to use and copy the URL or finally, to create your own ThinkLink scene, watch the video at the "Getting Started with Thinglink”.
5. If you want to create your own ThingLink, you will need to start with an image or a montage of images you can create by inserting them in a single PowerPoint slide which you save as a .jpg image file for uploading. You will also need to identify the Web content you want to link to the image.
6. Create a ThingLink account following with the step by step instructions located at How to use Thinglink
7.  You can embed google forms, audio, video, images and text.

How-To

1. Teach or review the content of the ThingLink scene. 
2. Open a Web browser to the ThingLink scene. (See one of the example Web sites, in the Getting Started Guide.)
3. As a whole class or individually, students select the links to read, watch, listen, depending on the content that is linked.
4. If you want students to use mobile device(s), have them download the apps for iPhone/iPad or Android devices.

Teacher Tips

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• With ThingLink, an image can be combined with text and many links to just about anything online to tap into many learning styles. The links (referred to as “tags”) can be strategically placed on an image, allowing students to delve further into a topic and learn more through added support in the form of Web sites, other images, audio, video, and music.
• Teachers can use the free classroom channel to create and deliver content. ThingLink scenes can be commented on and embedded on class Web pages or in course management systems (such as Moodle).

More Ways

ThingLink can be used for more than vocabulary teaching. Teachers can make a ThingLink interactive image for many purposes:

• to gauge what students already know about an upcoming course topic
• to use as an advanced organizer to introduce information before a class reading and thus activate schema to help students connect new concepts with their pre-existing knowledge
• to provide a review before a unit assessment
• to provide tutorials for technology
• to flip the classroom by having students view a ThingLink interactive image outside of class time
• to explain an infographic
• to provide definitions of terminology.

To give you more ideas for potential uses of ThingLink in your own teaching situation and discipline, see the What ThingLink can do for Education interactive image, which includes these and other teaching ideas: class calendars, tutorials for using classroom equipment such as in a science lab, diagrams / concept maps, timelines / biographies, interactive maps, and class discussion forums. You can see an 360 Photo ESL lesson that was developed on Thinglink at 360 Photo Lesson

If students have their own mobile devices (cell phones or tablets), they can download the ThingLink app for free and be assigned to take photos at school, at work, or in the community and create ThingLink images to share with the class. Possible student uses of ThingLink for project-based assignments can include self introductions, digital storytelling, book or film reviews or reports, family histories, timelines and biographies, reports on any class content / unit, interactive resumes or class portfolios, art analyses, and how-to presentations.

With a teacher’s account, you can add students to your channel, which allows for pair or team collaborations in one spot, and students do not need to register for the site; you provide student logins that the site generates after you enter students’ names or IDs to a group in your account.

Program Areas

• ESL: English as a Second Language

Levels

• Beginning Literacy
• Beginning Low
• Beginning High
• Intermediate Low
• Intermediate High
• Advanced
• All Levels

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