Thinglink

    I visited Thinglink for this week's blog assignment. I thought it was very easy to use and like most sites, they have a very helpful search page for any questions you may have. Thinglink helps teachers make pictures more engaging for students and encourages adding links to videos and pictures so you can layer your videos and pictures with web links, images, other videos and even student polls. As a Literature teacher, you could tailor this for any lesson. Thinglink gives students a ton of easily accessible sites and images as a precursor to the stories the class reads. Whether it's a novel that takes a month to get through or a short story which lasts only a few days, the amount of information gleaned by using Thinglink is pretty much boundless. Even though students are manipulating the internet, the teacher is in control of what they want the students to focus on. If I wanted to introduce information about a particular setting or characters, I could quickly and easily utilize a number of different videos or pictures that pinpoint those story features.
    For teachers to utilize Thinglink, they should go to edu.thinglink.com and register for no charge. Another cool feature is that the site also allows teachers to create student lists which mass register classes on the same Thinglink picture. This way they can all access the same image simultaneously and individually click on different links. Any age group could use Thinglink because even younger elementary can click on a link to access images and videos. Obviously, teachers would need to make sure they've added age appropriate links to the video or picture. You can also look at other Thinglink projects by searching topics from the site just like you would on Google. It's neat to have access to some of the different creations from other teachers or even students so you can ascertain some ideas for your upcoming projects.