According to their website, ThingLink is a product identification tool that makes it easy to add clickable tags to any image on the web and share the tagged images on social networks. ThingLink also claims to be the leading provider of image and video interaction tools in the classroom.
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| My very first Thinglink creation on the topic of copyright |
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| My actual first ThingLink image |
Anyway, back to ThingLink. Behind the scenes, ThingLink runs on JavaScript to serve up rich media content (images, video, etc.) on top of an online image. This additional content appears when viewers move their mouse over tagged areas of the image. This seems like such a simple concept, but it has huge potential, because an infinite amount of additional resources could be connected to that single image. This technology increases engagement through interactivity. It’s no longer just t a static one-dimensional image, but a portal to an endless world of content.
Last week I wrote about digital content curation and how this practice distills the world wide web down into its best parts. ThinkLink has a similar value proposition and allows you to easily cull materials from all over and present them in an engaging fashion. I can see this as a very useful tool in the classroom and could really apply to any subject matter. Students could find a picture, or be assigned a picture for inspiration and from that create an interactive presentation into whatever theme it is. They could curate using existing media found online, or it could be used to showcase their own original content that has been uploaded or created digitally. ThingLink also provides the ability for teachers to organize their students into groups to make managing and sharing easier. It even allows students to add comments to images created by classmates. With the advent of rich media tagging technology of applications like ThingLink, glue sticks, scissors and construction paper may soon be a thing of the past!
Nice ideas for using Thinglink. Add it to the wiki?
ReplyDeleteHaving a Mac, I hadn't heard about this until now. Thanks for sharing, I will definitely be checking this out to use for the upcoming school year!
ReplyDeleteMaganne, in my short amount of time trying out this tool, I saw a lot of potential for use in the classroom. This would be an awesome alternative to the traditional book report. For a social studies class, students could create images on different states or countries and then view and comment on their classmates images. Check out my full write-up about ThingLink on the EME6414 Nuclino page.
ReplyDeleteHi Erick. Thanks for the detailed post on ThingLink. I am aware that you are new to the tool, but wanted to know if you were aware of the issue with ThingLink about its code not extending to new pages of blog. Also, does the code have to be embedded on blog itself? Thanks again!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment Vaibhav. Your question prompted me to go back and explore the sharing options ThingLink provides. I initially tried to embed the ThingLink widget on my blog per these instructions. I was able to do it and it was pretty neat because it provided an overlay on all the images on my site where I could click to “tag” them in ThingLink directly from my blog. The only problem was, the pop-ups were being blocked.
DeleteI just went back to see about embedding an already tagged image on my site using these instructions. If you notice, my blog article has been updated with a live version of my first ThingLink creation.
Then I got curious as to why my first attempt didn’t work, so I revisited the instructions and tried to install the widget and...it worked! If you hover over the original static image at the top of my post, you’ll notice a tag pop-up with a link to the US Copyright office.
I tested it out on another browser that I was not already logged into my ThingLink account and the edit feature is available, so I wonder, if you were to click the edit button and log into your ThingLink, would it place tags over top of my image on my site? Feel free to give it a try if you want, I’m curious to know if that’s possible.
So to answer your second question, you can either directly embed the image into your post -or- if you have the widget installed, you can simply tag images that are already on your site. The latter seems easier in my opinion.
I am not aware of the issue you reference with new pages of a blog. I'll have to do some research on that.