ThingLink | library360lab

ThingLink

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Edited: Jan 18, 2018

ThingLink is a tool for annotating screenshots, pictures, and 360 images with video, text, and calls to action. Anyone can set up a basic account for free and annotate screenshots and 2D images. This is a fantastic tool for making database instruction more engaging, and giving links to lots of resources without overwhelming students, because all of the information in anchored in a single image or series of 2-3 related images.

ThingLink Premium Education subscriptions allow the development of ThingLink 360 virtual tours. To make one, a subscriber simply uploads a 360 image, or uses one of the stock images available, and then annotates it with icons that, when clicked, pop up a message, link, or video. Icons can also be used to create links to related 360 images to create virtual tours. The teacher account also allows students to use ThingLink to create presentations/tutorials of their own.

ThinkLink 360 tours are very easy to make and can be posted on the organization’s web site, Facebook, or hosted on the ThingLink servers at a universally accessible url (which is the default). Downsides include the cropping of text from tags when viewing with mobile devices, bugs in the sharing options between students and teacher, and an incompatibility with older versions of Internet Explorer. New Premium Teacher for Teams pricing starts at $500/year for 8 seats and sharing within one departmental team. Click here for a complete list of educational pricing and features that starts at the individual teacher (or librarian!) level. ThingLink also has a June 2017 presentation posted that describes School and District level pricing.

Google Launches 360 Tour Tools

Google's new Tour Creator is designed to make it easy for anyone to create and interactive virtual tour, using either their own 360 images or images grabbed from Google Street View. You can read a VR Scout article describing the launch at https://vrscout.com/news/google-tour-creator or check out Tour Creator for yourself at https://vr.google.com/tourcreator

WondaVR

WondaVR facilitates the development of immersive role playing games, the annotation of 360 photos and video with hotspots, and to create virtual product demonstrations. Because it is desktop rather than browser-based, content can be created that uses your institution's custom fonts for more seamless branding. WondaVR has three education pricing levels -- $79 annual subscription for students, $349 per year for teachers, and $3,449 for an annual campus subscription with 50 installations. This software is something you download, rather than use in the cloud.

Viar360

Viar360 is the choice of a number of universities for the development of VR lessons that can be integrated in to existing VLE/LMS. It can be used to create interactive stories with more than one option for students to choose, and visual editors to facilitate the development of branching narratives. Viar360 includes built-in analytics to facilitate assessment and development.