ThingLink is fantastic.  It is user-friendly for all grades and allows for quick formative assessment in individualized, differentiated ways.  Basically, ThingLink is a quick way to add notes, links, and relevant images/videos to an image or video that is uploaded by the teacher or student.  It layers information using tags.  Check out this video to see how easy it is to create a basic ThingLink.

With a free teacher account, I can add up to 100 students under one class.  For only $35 per year, I can upgrade to the teacher premium account and have 30 groups and up to 1,000 students!  Purchasing the premium account also enables video uploading and editing.  As an added bonus, ThingLink is offering free Professional Development for Teachers, as announced at ISTE 2015.  To enroll in the ThingLink Teacher Challenge, simply click the link and scroll to Join Us (or click here).  Complete the Google Form and they will send an invitation code and more information.

I plan to use this tool next school year as my students complete Genius Hour projects.  They can choose the topic and showcase their learning using ThingLink by layering tags of text, links, and other photos.  My fifth graders will be using ThingLink in math.  I will give them a word problem and have them solve it.  Then they will take a picture of their problem and solution and upload it into ThingLink.  They will record themselves explaining the thought-process in solving the problem and tag it on their ThingLink image.  They will, then, share the ThingLink with peers for peer review.

For my younger students, I want to work on text features, so I will upload an image of a magazine/newspaper article and have them label the text features with tags of text.  My first graders learn how to read a map in class.  I plan to use ThingLink to upload an image of a map and have students identify the various components of the map through text and image tags.  There are so many ways ThingLink can be used in the classroom.  What are some ways you have used, or will use, ThingLink?  Share a link to your project in the comments if you’ve used it before!