Cool New Tool - ThingLink

I had a go at ThingLink and my principal emailed it to the Board of Trustees because he loved it.  And it really wasn't that hard!  If you want something with that wow factor that won't take forever to learn then this is it.  



So basically ThingLink enables you to add music, video, text, images etc to any image you like.  I wanted parents to be able to find out what class their children were in and then immediately be able to learn about the teacher in that class.  A video of them would have been great but I made do with their staff profiles on our website.

The site you want is www.thinglink.com.  Here is a video tutorial to get you started.  

I ended up changing my school site map to make the classrooms slightly bigger to fit the links in.  Even after I had made them as small as possible they were too large for my original map.  So have a think about how much room you have and where you will put your links.  

You also don't want a lot of links close to each other.  Our admin team have their own profiles but I chose to have one link to the whole team so there weren't a whole bunch of links crowded together.

If you want some ideas of ways to use ThingLink you can look at some of the examples on the site.  If you want to use it in the classroom (or library) then have a look at the suggestions here.

All in all I had a blast trying ThingLink and would recommend it to everyone.  Go on, have a go!

Help me...I'm doing another one!

To clarify, that's another MOOC - Massive Open Online Course.  I started last year with my gamification course, managed to fit in the Google Power Searching course near the end and then moved on to a creative commons offering which proved too hard to fit in right around Christmas.  This year I decided I should take it easy and work on all the other projects I have planned, but I was tempted into joining #etmooc.  This is an educational technology & media mooc that has over 1200 participants from 67 countries.  The international organisers are professors and other gurus from the educational technology field.  How could I resist?!  If you're interested in finding out more about it then check here.  They hold blackboard collaborate sessions and are on twitter and have a Google+ community.

My orientation week activity was to create an introductory video about myself.  I joined Google+ to see what everyone else was doing and decided to have a go with Animoto, which has the advantage of being very short (30 secs max on free version). 


Try our slideshow maker at Animoto.

I am very keen to continue with this mooc and meet like-minded people from around the world.  As I say in the video I do love to learn new things.  The trick will be fitting it in with everything else.  Any time management tips would be much appreciated!