Mrs. Waggoner’s fourth graders at Chamberlayne Elementary wanted a fun way to review the famous Virginians that they have been learning about this year. So I introduced them to a site called Thinglink. It lets you create interactive photos like online newspapers sometimes publish with hotspots that provide information when you rollover them. I created a couple of examples to show the students first. One was a picture of a horned lizard with hotspots describing its adaptations. Another was a timeline of the Civil War with hotspots describing the different events. So once the students had an idea of what the site could do, they picked a famous Virginian, embedded the photo in a Thinglink, and added hotspots describing the person’s accomplishments. When they were finished I posted all the links to a GoogleDoc so anyone could access all the pictures for review… even at home! Hopefully you can see there are a lot of ways to use this site in your classroom. Take a look at some student examples: Stonewall Jackson, Maggie Walker, James Lafayette, Robert E. Lee, and Arthur Ashe.
