Tag: multimedia

Share and Inspire Through ThingLink Interactive Image Slams

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Talented members of our rapidly growing ThingLink Education Community have discovered ways to leverage the power of ThingLink for a variety of innovative uses across all content areas and grade levels. ThingLink Interactive Image Slams are informal webinars designed to provide educators with a opportunities to share creative ways to transform teaching and learning with ThingLink.


Discover the endless creative possibilities for enriching students’ enthusiasm for learning like never before through this unique webinar highlighting the work of our users. 

Grab a Chance in the Spotlight

Learn about how you can have a chance to share an inspiring image of your own. Collaborate with other participants through a back channel and sign up for a session on 9/16 or 9/18.

Learn More and Sign up

Meet Our Guest Panelists

September 16th at 8:00 PM EDT

Free Webinar: Transform Teaching & Learning with ThingLink

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Are you looking for a user friendly and flexible tool to help you easily create engaging multimedia rich content to redefine teaching and learning? Are you interested in using technology to meet the personal learning needs of the students in your classroom? We invite you to attend our free webinar and explore the powerful possibilities that exist with ThingLink EDU. 

ThingLink EDU is a digital tool that provides users with the ability to turn any image or video into a multimedia rich interactive learning tool. Start with an image or start with a video. Annotate it with audio, video, images and links to any content on the Internet with the click of a button. 

Please join us for a free webinar as we explore inspiring examples and easy-to-follow instructions to help you transform teaching and redefine learning with ThingLink. 
August 18th at 4:00 PM CST

Engage Students in Informed Decision Making

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With access to an abundance of online resources, students can become informed decision makers and stakeholders in their own learning.  Use of online polls, surveys, and digital tools for collecting feedback can turn passive observers into active participants. 

The ThingLink Teacher Challenge this week asked educators to explore the use of an interactive image for informing and collecting feedback from an audience. We introduced Polldaddy as an integrated tool for the task. Polldaddy is an excellent choice because rich-media tags support embedding of a poll into an interactive image, allowing the poll to pop up without leaving the page. Of course, there are many web tools available for collecting feedback and any of those tools can be linked to a ThingLink interactive image.




Examples of Using ThingLink for Informed Decision Making

Participants self-published their interactive images on the Padlet wall linked below. Many participants chose to create interactive images to share tech tools and collect feedback about popular choices, which makes the images particularly useful for teachers as we approach the start of the school year. I hope you will explore the Padlet and watch it grow as more participants add images. There is a wealth of expertise here!

Final Thoughts

As we kick off a new school year I encourage teachers to consider creating activities to inform students and collect feedback as alternative to traditional homework assignments. Completing this type of activity prior to class can maximize instructional time and it is certainly more interesting than a worksheet. Just think about the possibilities that exist with ThingLink and tools for collecting feedback!

News from ISTE: ThingLink gives educators free early access to its new video editor

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This post was written by Ulla Engestrom and originally published on the ThingLink Blog.



Exciting news: in the past months we have been hard at work building a new editor for annotating video content with rich media. The new editor allows users to add notes and links to existing video content, and this way turn video into a digital discovery platform.

An early access to ThingLink for Video is announced at ISTE, one of the largest international conferences for educational technology. We at ThingLink believe that interactive images and video will become the 21st century textbook, and teachers are driving this change by being fast adopters of, not only new technology, but also a new way of thinking. As the use of video in education grows, ThingLink is empowering teachers and students to easily create interactive video content and facilitate in-video conversations.




The ability to creatively combine web content with interactive images and video opens up new possibilities for teaching and learning. With ThingLink for Video, teachers and students can enrich educational videos with facts, detailed articles, additional content and questions. They can also search and share videos created by their colleagues, and this way access a wider network of interactive video content creators.

ThingLink for Video is currently available via invitation only. Educators can request a free early access starting from today.

If you are visiting ISTE this year, please come to meet us at ThingLink’s booth no 2869 and share the news with your colleagues!

Here are two examples of videos annotated with ThingLink. Kingdom Of The Forest – Fungi (National Geographic) 




Mushroom 




LongWayHome

The Ultimate Word Wall with ThingLink & Padlet

On By soxnevadIn Uncategorized2 Comments

I am fortunate to be working with an amazing group of educators this summer for the ThingLink Teacher Challenge. This week’s challenge to design an activity to  help students Dig Deeper Into Vocabulary, a topic I am very passionate about.

I also love Word Walls and have been using them for as long as I can remember. While I was once frustrated by trying to keep taped images up on a physical wall, I now find the process to be streamlined and slick with the help of one of my favorite tools, Padlet

Benefits of Padlet at a Glance

  • Padlet is a free, flexible and user friendly tool that is available online, 24/7
  • Users can create account and design Padlets for a variety of purposes for teaching and learning. 
  • Students can contribute to Padlets without an email address, just tap to add an image.
  • Padlet works well on a computer and also from the web browser on an iPad. 
  • There’s no tape or physical space limitations with these types of word walls.
  • Padlet is capable is displaying text, images and video.
  • Padlet can be embedded into a blog, wiki or website.
  • Padlet supports ThingLink interactive images!

Using Padlet to Create The Ultimate Word Wall of Interactive Images

As the interactive images for the challenge started rolling in, I had the idea to build a Word Wall of vocabulary activities. The word wall is embedded below, but to get a better view you might want to visit the full wall on the Padlet site. 
Click on any image to preview and explore any interactive vocabulary image created by teachers from all over the world. If you want to explore the full version of an image, click the Share icon on the ThingLink image to grab the link. If you want to embed the image into your own space, grab the embed code.

Be sure to check back as many more images are submitted. This wall will grow throughout the summer.

//padlet.com/embed/fi64ga5bqb6k

For a better viewing experience go to Padlet to view this wall.

Join Us for the ThingLink Teacher Challenge

Educators Design Your Digital Self

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Join Us for the ThingLink Teacher Challenge

I have been having a lot of fun connecting with educators and expanding my PLN this summer as I facilitate the ThingLink Teacher Challenge. 

This challenge is a free, self-paced, online summer professional development opportunity designed to help teachers transform classroom teaching and e-learning with ThingLink, an easy-to-use interactive image and video platform. Teachers complete one activity each week and explore ways to use the tool in the classroom.



The challenge this week is Design Your Digital Self. The goal is to use ThingLink to create an interactive avatar to serve as an introduction to other members of the challenge. The activity is well-suited for a variety of student-driven learning experiences in the classroom, and it provides educators with opportunities to remind students about Internet safety and protecting their identities when online. As a bonus, the challenge uses a guided lesson, or channel of interactive images, as a teaching tool which can also be used to facilitate classroom instruction. All the directions and resources are in one place.

Showcase: Design Your Digital Self

Images submitted for each challenge are displayed in a ThingLink Channel to showcase the great work educators are doing. As more participants submit images, the channels grow. Meet the ThingLink Challenge Teachers.


View our weekly Showcase of images.

Take the ThingLink Teacher Challenge

Since the challenge is self-paced, there is still plenty of time to sign up and join us.


Mange Classroom Workflow with Showbie

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Are you looking for an easy and efficient way to manage the workflow in your 1:1 iPad classroom?

Showbie is an iPad app that offers a solution to help teachers distribute, collect and evaluate digital assignments created on an iPad. Showbie is simple and efficient right out of the box. 



Teachers can get started with Showbie by creating a free account to try the app. The free account allows for a limited, but substantial number of assignments before requiring an upgrade to the paid version. This should provide teachers with more than enough opportunity to thoroughly evaluate the effectiveness of the app within the classroom. Within the teacher account, teachers can create individual classes. Students join a class with a code, avoiding the need for an email addresses. Within each class, teachers create assignments with due dates and distribute them through a shared folder.


Assignments can be created and distribute through the shared folder using a variety of supported file types, making this a flexible tool that appeals to a variety of teaching styles and needs. Once assignments are turned in,teachers can provide students with individual feedback through voice or text notes. Assignments turned in via Showbie are stored in the cloud, which allows students and teachers to free up valuable storage space on their own devices. 



    A Wide Variety of Supported Productivity Apps

    Showbie supports integration with many apps so it is designed to grow with teachers and students as they expand their toolkit of creativity and productivity resources. Currently there are 48 supported apps, but the list is likely to expand through feedback and requests from teachers in the Showbie community. The folks at Showbie have created quick video tutorials to help teachers and students learn to turn in assignments created with the supported tools. View the current list of apps that work with Showbie on the Showbie website.