ThingLink - A Great Online Resource

Next year, my school is going to be completely wireless (thank God!) as part of a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) program spreading across my district. BYOD means that teachers and students can bring their own mobile devices (tablet, smartphones, etc.) to school to utilize in instruction. In order to prepare for this, during the past school year our specials team professional development has been focused on technology use in the classroom where I learned about lots of free online resources that you can use in the classroom and students can easily access at home. One of the BEST things I've found is a website called ThingLink.

ThingLink allows users to create interactive "touch images" that allows you to collect web-based resources (websites, YouTube links, flickr images, etc.) in one place that you and students can easily access. When first looking at a ThingLink Image it looks like a plain old picture. But when you scroll over it different icons appear (VOILA!) showing links to online resources that you can then click on and explore. It sounds complicated, but trust me it isn't.

One of the touch images I've created on ThingLink was to help enhance a 5th grade unit study on composers. I started by making a collage of nine different composers I wanted the students to explore on PicMonkey (another great, FREE resource for photo editing) and uploading it to ThingLink.

My composer collage made on PicMonkey!

Once the image is uploaded, you can add "touches" to different areas of the image. For this specific image I added two links to each composer, one that links to a kid-friendly composer biography and the other to a YouTube link of a listening example. 

Adding a tag to an image, suuuuuper easy! 

Once you have added all your tags/links, save your image and you are ready to go! 

What I like best about ThingLink, is that the YouTube links open from the ThingLink page, not from YouTube, which helps to prevent those annoying ads from popping up and playing when you're trying to watch a video. And it has a free mobile app that you can download on your iPhone. One of my goals for this summer is to create useful ThingLinks that I can use to help enhance my instruction for next school year, so look for more to be added as the beginning of the school year approaches! I added links to three different touch images I've made already, the composer one from this post, The Orchestra (useful for instrument families and individual instruments), and The Carnival of the Animals (I used it for a review with my Kindergraten classes after we did a unit study on the music).

My ThingLinks! 

Composers ThingLink 

The Orchestra 

Carnival of the Animals