My Books from GoodReads

Hope Was Here
Copper Sun
Unwind
The Hunger Games
Hip-Hop High School
Airman
A Brief Chapter in My 

Impossible Life
Stoneheart
Stargirl
The Alchemyst (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, 

#1)
The Last Olympian
The Ruins of Gorlan
The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Kropp
Breaking Dawn
Twilight
I'll Be There
The Knife of Never 

Letting Go
Thirteen Reasons Why
Evermore
The London Eye Mystery


Some of Mr. Padula's Favorite Books
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Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Experimenting with Thinglink

Once again, I got an interesting tech tip from my #sschat Twitter feed. Greg Kulowiec, one of the deans of #sschat and the person who blew me away with his Teaching History with Technology class, recommended a site called Thinglink. Here, you can upload images from a variety of sources, then embed (or 'tag') the image with hyperlinks. The examples from their site looked so interesting, I decided to give it a try.

To make it easy for me, I decided to take an image from one of my favorite lessons, the Boston Massacre. In this lesson, we examine Paul Revere's famous engraving of the Boston Massacre, or as he named it, The Bloody Massacre perpetrated in King Street. Students study the image and note 10 things they noticed - the more interesting the better. Then, we examine a news story written at the time of the event and do a compare-and-contrast between the written account and Revere's image. We find at least three things that don't match and three things that do match. Students have a great time with this, as they have a hard time believing that the written account and the image do NOT match in so many ways. This leads us into an AWESOME conversation about purpose, bias, and the power of images.

I took some of the match/do not match items that students came up with and created FIVE embedded links within this image. Can you find them all?



Impressions:
Once I uploaded my image into Thinglink, I just clicked 'Edit image' and the picture gets placed in a simple to use editor. Clicking anywhere on the image makes a tag appear.

Thinglink made it VERY easy to embed my jazzed up image into this blog post by generating a nice block of embed code that I simply cut-and-paste into this write up. SO easy!

This has great potential!

Uses:
To start, I kept it simple and used straight text tags - just to see how it looked. Then, my mind really starting thinking about what I could do with the full range of functionality they have to offer. Here's just a FEW:

- Posing questions that students need to answer
   (e.g. 'What is the soldier on the far right doing?')

- Adding a sound clip of the event:



- Adding depth/clarity to confusing/unusual items in an image - and offering extra credit if students dig a little deeper!:



- Turning an image into a jumping off point for a research project:



Thinglink also offers color options for the tags you embed. If these became a standard tool in your bag of multimedia offerings, I could see color-coding tags so that (for example):
- blue = basic information
- green = 'learn more'
- red = extra credit, etc...

I am sure there are so many more ways to use this. Feel free to comment and add your own ideas!