FTT - ThingLink

Sign up for a free ThingLink account to create interactive images

Creating Interactive Images Using ThingLink

@joe_edtech/@LisaBerghoff

Earlier this Fall I took my daughter and a friend of hers to the Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield. Since I am a bit of a History nerd - specifically an American Civil War nerd - my daughter is not new to the topic. She's been dragged across the battlefield at Gettysburg, carried to Ford's Theater in DC, and even read a young adult version of the story of Lincoln's Assassination and the hunt for John Wilkes Booth. But there is something powerful in an image. As visitors walk through one of the exhibits at the museum, they turn a dark corner and enter a room flooded with uncomfortable red light bathing a slave auction. We hit that room and I felt her little hand grab mine and I looked at her. Her face was covered with shock, fear, sadness - she'd read all about this. But now she saw it. And it affected her.

When I taught history, I gradually came to believe I spent too much time focusing on words, and not enough time focusing on images. I'm not saying words aren't important - they really are what we have from most of history - but images engage the emotions. That's not a new or shocking discovery, researchers have been saying it for years.

With a "free-ish" Web 2.0 tool called ThingLink, it is easy to take any digital image and make it interactive - an image to explore instead of just take in. Below, I've taken a simple image of the State of Illinois and added a couple of Tags. The tags are interactive and can take your students to places where they can find more information. Take your mouse and hover over the image and you'll find there are two interactive tags. Click them, and they take you to an informational website and an overview video.

Creating an interactive image is easy. All you have to do is choose an image from the Web or upload one from your computer. In the "Text" box, type your tag. This can be a short description or a set of directions. In the "Link or image address" box, you can make your tag interactive. I've labeled "Alton, Illinois" on the map. When students click that tag, I want them to be taken to the official website of the City of Alton, so I pasted that URL in the "Link or image address" box. By the way, you can put the URL of information websites, videos, or link to your classroom website or LMS. The images you create can be saved publicly or privately.

ThingLink allows you to tag videos as well. In the following video, I've added two tags - both links to different websites that can provide students with a little more information on the video they have been assigned to watch. You'll notice the tags right away because they are blue text boxes stamped with an "i" icon for information.

I introduced ThingLink by calling it "free-ish." Everything that I've demonstrated in today's blog post can be done with a free account. However, there are several different levels of premium accounts that will give you access to more features. If you are sharing with students, a free account should get you all that you need.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Want to take your image creation to the next level? Free Technology for Teachers published a piece on using Google Slides, ThingLink, and Snagit from Chrome to have students create interactive presentations to share with the class.