Supporting geography teachers and their students with ThingLink
Birkbeck’s Environmental Education Team have created new resources using ThingLink, an interactive media creation tool, to support A-level Geography teaching.
ThingLink is a media creation tool that allows users to annotate digital items and build engaging, interactive learning experiences. Images, video, and even 360 camera footage can all be added, along with text and links to other resources, to create a rich online resource.
By thoughtfully curating media, educators can create a cohesive learning experience that maintains student engagement, providing context as each item is encountered. Instead of directing students to interact with disparate resources across various platforms, which can lead to distraction by unrelated recommendations or overwhelm by multiple open tabs, the ThingLink experience serves as a cohesive framework that integrates diverse content types effectively.
We have created two freely accessible ThingLink experiences to support A-Level Geography teaching.
Our virtual field trip to New Orleans explores the impacts of Hurricane Katrina and underlying causes of the disaster. Students are introduced to the science of how hurricanes form, and their impacts, including storm surges. They explore an interactive map, annotated with photos of the hurricane’s impacts alongside Google Streetview scenes of key locations today. They encounter different kinds of data that prompt us to question the social as well as the environmental determinants of vulnerability, and questions to check understanding are interspersed along the way.
To support teaching relating to global commons, we’ve created an interactive map of Antarctic, which can support a role-play exercise about Antarctic resource governance. This example shows how a ThingLink experience can be integrated with other activities in the classroom, to support collaboration as well as delivering content. This map is annotated with character bios, along with videos and 360 scenes to help students better understand the stakeholder they have been assigned. Teaching notes to support delivery of the role-play activity are embedded in the ThingLink experience, too.
Dr Aideen Foley from the Environmental Education Team and James Cull from the Virtual Reality and Immersive Learning Team recently shared these resources at the Geographical Association annual meeting, where we had the opportunity to connect with numerous teachers interested in leveraging digital resources to enhance geography teaching and bring the subject to life for their students.
We are keen to hear about how educators use these resources. Contact Dr Aideen Foley to share your experiences with us.