Share Interactive Images with ThingLink

Would you find it useful to share interactive images you have tagged with notes and links to Web sites? If so, you might want to give ThingLink a try. This tool lets you create hot spots on images, which when clicked on reveal the notes that you have added and lead the viewer to the Web sites of your choosing. You can tag individual images or enable ThingLink for your entire site. It's easy to use, with a free basic account that should provide most instructors and students with the features they need. In just a few minutes I registered for an account, uploaded the image above, and created some tags for it. Once I had saved my work I simply copied the embed code that was provided and pasted it into this post, and I was also given the option to share a link to the tagged image on the ThingLink site (https://www.thinglink.com/scene/232552176386310144#tlsite).

ThingLink provides ways to create more active engagement with images. Of course, you can link to sites featuring text, but with links to video and audio files an image might also serve as a multimedia launcher. There is an option to allow anyone to edit an image, so you could have students interact with images you have posted, or have them post and tag their own images as part of an assignment. There are lots of possibilities here -- we would love to know if you decide to use ThingLink in your teaching.

Image: profzucker (Steven Zucker), Jacques-Louis David, The Oath of the Horatii in frame with viewer (detail), 2011, available from Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.