Tech guru Lisa Johnson introduced me to this fabulous resource right on time. My students are beginning a geometry unit, and I can’t think of a better way to expose them to the voluminous vocabulary than using thinglink! What is thinglink? Check it out here.
To make my own creation, I designed a slide in Keynote with various geometric figures of interest. I scanned the web for some links for students to explore, and quickly found that interactive iPad-friendly links for geometry topics are a bit sparse out there (sooo many great goodies rely on flash currently, boo!) I did stumble upon shmoop.com which I found to be very refreshing with just enough dry humor for any middle-schooler to enjoy 😉 Plus, there are some iPad-friendly “exercises” built in for each geometry topic so students have a chance to quiz themselves along the way. Nice!
I plan to use this thinglink tomorrow as an anchoring activity after students finish an assessment on the previous unit. Once we can come together as a class and get started on the new content, my hope is that students have already become quite familiar with the thinglink content. What a versatile little tool!
<> Have you used thinglink in the classroom? Please share your ideas! *Update* This was a great way to introduce the next unit as students finished a quiz today. It was fun to watch them all clicking different topics and previewing the upcoming content. I explained to them that this thinglink even serves as a nice little study guide for a future assessment. I would love to create one or two of these for every chapter! After using the Shmoop website, I couldn’t resist showing this popular Seinfeld clip at the end of the class period. No, YOU’RE Shmoopie! No, You’re Shmoopie!
P.P.S. Here’s another ThingLink for exploring Scientific Notation topics too: