Thing Link is tool that allows educators and students embed audio, video and rich media links directly in images and share them across the web. This tool is free to use and very simple to operate. An effective tool encourages interactive thinking and collaborating. In the classroom, setting it can be efficiently incorporated into group work and every day teaching plans as a way to engage students. Thinglink is a cloud-based tool so there is no need to download and install software with files being on a specific computer. Due to this, users can access the service through multiple devices using several operating systems. Products are stored on the ThingLink site so students or educators do not necessarily need a web site to publish however the option to share to social media or other websites is featured and can be utilised if need be. Furthermore, ThingLink supports multiple languages, including English, French, Japanese, Finnish, Spanish, Chinese, Swedish, Italian, Hindi, Russian, Portuguese, German and Polish making it a diversely useful tool.
Usage
ThingLink can be used by teachers or students to designate parts of sites or pages with pictures and videos that will produce a pop-up with a description and or a link to something else on the web when they are scrolled over. To do this students and educators use rich media tags to incorporate links to other sources such as YouTube, wiki,etc. By doing this educators and students make static images interactive and henceforth learning becomes more engaging. ThingLink also allow users to track analytics of the images and links that they have shared so users can keep track of how their images/videos have been received. ThingLink is easy to set up for all major web publishing and blogging platforms, including WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, Wikispaces and Drupal., ThingLink offers plans targeting education with a free plan that is very adequate for educational purposes and very easy to access. Sign up and account creation is straightforward and can be done ahead of time by educators on behalf of students. The design interface requires little training and is very simplistic in design.
Review
“Students can create, collaborate and communicate and engage in critical thinking and problem solving. It is an amazing tool that is transforming teaching and learning. It’s a tool that can be used for annotating images and defining through multimedia, students can use mobile apps for iOS and Android to quickly capture life’s moments with wifi and overall it helps students develop 21st century skills.”- EdTech
Tool Evaluation
