If you gave a man a hammer with no further instructions, would he figure out its primary purpose was hitting things? Hammers are for hammering in nails right? But maybe he’d see that nice little hook on the back and use it as a backscratcher. Or maybe he’d get his hands on two more and juggle them like this guy.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8t3-d7I-E4c]On Monday as part of my technology coach job I ran our science department through a great website called ThingLink. ThingLink allows you to take images and add “tags” anywhere on the image. These tags can be hyperlinks, youtube clips, google docs or slides and a whole host of other web content.
Click this link to see a ThingLink of my dog Dexter.
“What will staff do with this new tool?” Thinglink can be used by teachers to create interactive images. Or maybe having students create interactive images would be better. Thinglink also allows multiple people to tag the one image, perhaps a whole class would do one image. Or you can embed thinglinks inside thinglinks, a kind of russian doll thing as a whole class project.
Of course those are only the uses I can currently think of. But maybe there’s a hammer juggler in my school who will come up with a totally different idea.
Another interesting tool I’ve been looking at is Draftback. Draftback is a chrome extension that allows you to play back the creation of a google doc character by character. I’m writing this blog post a little apprehensively as I have a plan to post the draftback playback when I’m done.
I see huge potential for using draftback as a learning tool in classrooms. How? I’m not sure? Wouldn’t it be amazing to see the playback of a famous authors writing process? Perhaps they could narrate over the top and try to remember why it was they were deleting and rearranging things.
Or maybe students could narrate their own Draftbacks. What insights could we gain into their learning then?
I’m honestly not sure about how draftback could be used but I can’t wait to meet the teacher who uses it really well.
What do you think? How would you use this great tool? Watch me write this blog post below.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kln0tiLmWYo]
