Communicating Visually with ThingLink and Lucidchart

I had a great time yesterday chatting with two teachers, Melissa Barron and Leslie Loboda, and we were mustering around ideas on better tools for annotating texts and images online. With Diigo already something many teachers and students are accustomed to (see my previous post on Diigo here), we talked instead about ThingLink and LucidChart for visual communication tools. In addition, due to the fact that we decided not to renew our district subscription to Glogster for this year, these are great free tools that can supplement similar experiences for our students.

ThingLink allows users to add media-rich content and text to image files. It's somewhat like Facebook tagged-images meets storytelling and annotating as images come alive with music, text, video, images, hyperlinks, etc. It is extremely intuitive to use. Students can create and explore advertisements, time periods, vocabulary, authors and other topics by creating media bundles on one collective image. Here is a brief intro to ThingLink as well as 26+ strategies on how to use it in the classroom.
Note: If you're a teacher or student, you can upgrade your account to Education; it’s FREE. If a student is under the age of 13, a teacher, parent or legal guardian must provide consent for the child to use ThingLink.

A Brief Look at ThingLink

26+ Ways to use ThingLink (by Donna Baumbach)

Here's a sample

Lucidcharts is a common tool that Melissa uses with her 7th and 8th grade science classes as a shareable and interactive brainstorming, annotating, diagramming/flowchart tool.  Lucidcharts integrates instantly with Google Drive, and for students and teachers that are already accustomed to the sharing/editing aspect that goes on within Google Drive, using Lucidcharts will seem very familiar.  Simply sign up for a free account with your Google (D68 teachers - your email is a Gmail account) and then head on over to the Chrome Web Store and download the Chrome App, also free.  Once you have an account, be sure to do the free K-12 education upgrade!

Link: 10 ways to use Lucidcharts in the classroom

A Brief Look at Lucidcharts integration with Google (disregard the portion on Visio docs)

Here's a sample of a Lucidchart that D68 new teachers worked on together