Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “ThingLink Tutorial – Make Interactive Images”.
In this article, tutorial, we’re gon na look at thinglink, calm and thing link is an interesting service, an interesting website that enables people to create dynamic images and recently they’ve also delved into 360-degree content as well. But in this tutorial, we’re gon na focus mostly on how to create dynamic images using thinglink. Now, what it means by dynamic is that you can have an image and then place on that image. Hotspots and little points of interaction. Okay, like this speech bubble and whenever the viewer puts their mouse over or clicks on, these points of interaction things happen. Okay, maybe it takes you to a website. Maybe another image, pops up or a video starts to play, and so it’s pretty exciting to be able to take just a regular image like this one and then make it so that these hotspots bring in additional content.
So you can learn more about the different homes and the different parts of this city. So that’s just one example of many that I could show you and you can see several examples here on the thing link comm website. So, as you can see, there’s this big blue button here at the center that says get started, but before you click on that, you should consider what’s the purpose for using thing link, if you’re a teacher, you should definitely click here where it says education, if you’re Not a teacher, you can click here where it says pricing to get a sense of what it’s gon na cost.
You can use thing link completely for free. There are some limitations. As you can see here, your interactive videos would be limited to ten thousand views per month, which honestly is gon na, be probably enough for most people.
Okay. So this is a really good option, just the regular free account, but if you’re a business, perhaps or if you’re likely to get more than a hundred thousand views per month, maybe you’re a celebrity or something like that. Then you may want to pay to get one of these Pro accounts. But if you are a teacher or if you are a student, you can click here where it says education and it takes you to a page where you can learn more about. How thing link supports teachers – and there are some great sample thing, links that you can click on and you can see them in act? Okay, so here’s one! That’S definitely education related and you can see that there’s different hotspots that I can click on. It takes me to some audio from the Apollo landings and there’s also some videos that pop up on this interactive image. So if you are a teacher or a student, it’s better for you. If you go here to the education page for thing link and then click get started once you do that and get signed up, you’ll see that your free account is gon na, be just a little bit different than the regular free account.
You’Re gon na have a class account that you can use with your students, you’re gon na get some basic icons and some video tutorials and things like that. So that’s a good option for teachers and students. If you need more than you could pay for some of these Pro accounts. So having said all that, let’s jump in and start using thing link and you want to click, get started on either the education account or the business account.
Whichever is appropriate for you. Of course, you could put in your email and password and click create account, or you can just go here and sign in with one of your favorite services that you use, so I’m gon na just sign in with my Google account. So give me a second to do this and we’ll get started. Okay. Next, I need to complete my registration, and the most important thing to do here is to choose what your role is. So I’m gon na go down and say I’m a teacher I should put in my birthday and if I want to, I can put in an invitation code and invite code that would invite me to someone’s class or to collaborate with them.
I’M just gon na leave that blank in this case and you can subscribe to their newsletter if you’d like to or not I’m gon na click done, and it takes me now to the startup page for signing up and welcome. Ok, so I’m ready to start using thing link, and you can see here that they have something called my stream, where it’s kind of a social media aspect to thing linked similar. I guess – to Facebook and Twitter in some ways. But if you find people that you want to follow in thing linked, you’ll see a stream of the content that they’re creating. You can also click here where it says, featured to see some good examples. Some featured examples of thing links that are being created.
Ok, so there’s a few examples there that have popped up, but for the most part, you’re gon na want to go up here to the top, where it’s create and just click there, and it takes me to a screen what I need to decide. How am I gon na get the image that I want to turn into an interactive image now at this point, it also popped up with some available tutorials. So these are short. You know not comprehensive tutorials, but they will help you with individual aspects of using thin link, and so I hope that you’ll watch my video, of course, to give you the overview and the entire process of how to create a thin link.
But later let’s say you would like to do some of these things like learn: how to use this 360 degree features or setting up a second classroom group, etc. You could watch these available tutorials and see if they can help you for now, though, I’m just gon na click, this arrow to hide those tutorials, and you can see here that there’s four basic ways of getting your images into thinglink. You could upload from your hard drive and that’s the one that’s selected, and it gives me a couple of ways to do that. I could choose images or drag and drop them here or I could upload a panoramic image, a 360-degree image right. So, with a lot of smartphones today you can take a 360-degree photo or a panoramic photo, and you could upload that in to thinglink to use it, which is pretty exciting.
A second option is just to put in the URL for an image that you’ve found on the web and then bring that in you can also import from Facebook or you could import from public Flickr images. But in this case I already have the photo it’s on. My computer, so I’m just gon na click, upload from a hard drive, choose images or drag-and-drop I’ll click there, and it takes me to my computer and I can just navigate to the right, folder or the to the desktop or wherever it might be, to get the Image that I want to use, I just double click on it or click open, and now it’s pulling in that image that I want to turn into an interactive image right now, it’s just a plain, regular image, but it soon will be interactive.
Now I’m gon na click here at the top, where it says title: I’m gon na click and drag and erase that and put in my own new title and I’ll just call this countries of the world. Okay, so we’re gon na teach and learn about the different countries of the world using this interactive image notice. What you see here, it says, click to add a so I can simply click to put a tag on a particular place.
So when I clicked on the US, it added an icon now the icons that you get depend on the account that you signed up for so I signed up as an educator with a teacher account, and so it does give me a few extra icons. So I could change what that icon looks like okay. I could turn it into a letter, but these other icons below these are reserved for the paying customers. And so I can’t really use those notice that if you upgrade that you do get access to more icons and you can even upload your own icons and use those. But in this case I can just use the circles with the colors and I can use the letters and that’s fine with me. Okay, so now I get to decide what happens when the viewer puts their mouse on or clicks on this icon.
I was calling it a hot spot earlier, but what’s gon na happen? Well, there are a couple of possibilities. I could go in here and put in some text. Okay, so I could do something as simple as type in a message about this place.
Okay, and so now, when the viewer clicks on or puts their mouse over, this icon, they’re gon na see this is the USA. Okay, now another thing that you could do, if you want is, you could put in the link to a website or an image address. So, let’s look at a couple of examples of that.
I could just open up another tab like I just did and I can go to images google.com and of course you could do the same thing with being or Yahoo or several other search engines. But I’m just gon na go to images google.com and do a search for the American flag, and I can use really any one of these images and bring it in as an image over the map of the US. Now, if you want to be extra safe. Of course, you can go up here to tools, usage rights and filter out lots of the images so that you only see the ones that are labeled for reuse or reuse with modification. So I would like to use this one, so I just click on it.
Click view image, and this URL is what I would need to click on to highlight copy, and then I can come back here paste it in and now you can see that there’s an image associated with that icon and when it’s activated the viewer gets both the Text and the image now there are some options here at the left. I can choose it for it to be a small image. I can choose for it to be a large image. You can have a custom rich link, so there are some options about how the image pops up when it’s activated.
So I’m happy with that the way it is now notice that there are more styling options available. If you upgrade, you get advanced text styling and you get some more options like uploading, an image from your computer rather than just using the URL, I’m also uploading audio. Ok, so those are things that I can’t do with just this regular free account. Ok! Now I can go ahead and add a second icon or interactive hotspot, and to do this I need to zoom in I’d like to add a hotspot to the country of Chile, now notice, I’m just zooming in using the mouse using the scroll wheel. That’S on my mouse, but I could also use these plus and minus signs here or just fit to make it fit the available space. But in this case I’d like to zoom in on Chile, then I click to add a second icon, and then I could proceed. Just like I did before choosing an icon, putting in either text or link or both and then saving what I’m done. Ok now think about this.
Instead of putting in the link to an image, I could just as well put in a link to a website. So, for example, here is the official government website of Chile, and I could easily link to this on my thing link image. I just copied that URL, I’m back here in thing link and I can just click paste in that address and now, when I save it, makes this hotspot into a link that, when clicked, will take the viewer to the Chilean website. Now, in addition to linking to a website what else is on the internet that you could link to well, there’s tons of things on the internet, you could link to an interactive activity, a game, that’s online. You could link to a YouTube video and things like that.
So there’s lots of exciting possibilities for what you could link to out there on the internet. Now I do want to show one more example: instead of just clicking on a part of the image and then adding an icon there’s another way to do it. You can also go here to the upper left where it says, add videos, music or photos on your image, and you can search for content. Okay, so I would like a video about the country of Brazil. Okay, so I do a search and I can find a video that I might want to use. Let’S say this one and I can just click on it and it’s gon na add that video to my map now I put it in the wrong place. It didn’t know where Brazil is, but that’s, okay. I can simply click and drag that icon and put it where it should be, and now I’ve got a video. That’S part of my interactive image.
Okay, so you can see that there’s a couple of different ways to add things to your thing: link: you can click and then manually, add them or you can search for content and then bring that content in and put it where it needs to be. The last couple of things that you need to know about include the settings. If you click here on settings, you can make some decisions about. How visible is this image going to be? Do I want people to be able to stumble on to it or do I want it to be unlisted and that’s totally up to you? Do I want others to be able to edit my image and help me build it. That’S an option.
There’S also some advanced options, but you would have to upgrade if you wanted to use those and then finally, here in the lower right corner, there’s a button that says save image when you save it takes you to a screen where you get your actual finished project That is shareable with others, and this is where you truly get to see thing link in action. When I was building this, it was kind of difficult to navigate and I would accidentally move some of these icons and things like that. But now that I’ve finished it off, it’s done now.
It’S really working the way it should okay. So there’s my image and my text that popped up this one in Chile brought up a link that I can click to read more. It takes me to the Government of Chile website and this one here, pops up with a video about Brazil, and I can click play to watch that video. So I hope that you’re seeing the possibilities here of creating interactive activities for your students, if you’re a teacher, if you’re a student, an interactive presentation that the teacher or that your fellow students could click on and interact with it’s great for educational purposes. But there’s also some great business purposes and ways that you could use this in your personal life. I’M sure at this point you can see that there’s a few different options.
I have right side, but the most important one I think is share, and I can click share to embed this thing, link interactive image, embedded into a website or a blog or whatever it might be, or I could click on social and just post it that way To some of the social media websites, in many cases, though, the best option is here where it says, link you just copy that link you paste it on to your own website or into an email things like that, and people will be able to access your interactive Image alright. So from now on, when I go to thinglink comm – and I sign in to my account, if I want to get back into this image, to maybe edit it or to share it again, all I have to do is click here in the upper right where it Says me: it takes me to the images that I’ve made and I can click on one of them to either edit or to share it, or do some of these other things with it. So, thanks for watching, I hope you enjoy using thin link. I think it’s an exciting tool, especially for teachers and students, and I hope that you’ll consider connecting with me on some of my social media web sites like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, and please do subscribe to my youtube channel for more videos about technology for teachers and Students and watch for a new video, at least every Monday, .