Thinglink lets you easily add text and link overlays on media. I learned about it from a teacher at HFC a couple years ago. Reading Pacansky-Brock’s 2017 book I was reminded of it. I wanted a project to use to play with it to see if I thought it worthwhile. Today in Calculus 2 we worked on a problem. During the problem 3 questions came up that led to short side discussions. I wondered if I could take screen captures from the work today and turn the whole thing into a ThingLink.
I rewrote the main problem and captured it with my document camera. Then I captured the side discussion work as best I could. If I were starting from scratch I would probably do this differently. I uploaded everything into ThingLink using the CREATE button.
I then picked the main work as the first image. I chose edit and added a tour. I linked to the other file I wanted and changed the button type.
It seems to work well. I could add text or audio descriptions of the steps if I wanted. I added a text description saying not to use the browser back button, but instead the internal navigation. I navigated out of the example a couple times. I will add a link to my Thinglink and try to embed it at the end of the post (embed failed).
I did all this skipping the tutorial which is a test of how user friendly the software is. You could use this for step by step examples if you did not want to go back to the main image. I now need to consider whether I would use this enough to justify $35 per year. Video capture software by itself gets the same information out- just without student choices of what they want to see. (I would also worry about hitting the 12,000 view limit).
Thinglink does tons more. You can add pauses with questions to videos for instance. If you would use all the features the price is a bargain. If you wanted to track students, too, it is a huge bargain as the $35 includes 61 students seats.
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