We recently challenged members of our ThingLink Education Community to take the ThingLink App Smash Challenge. The challenge was designed to help educators discover new ideas for teaching and learning with an iPad by combining two or more apps together to create, publish and share content. The use of ThingLink as a presentation tool provides educators with powerful possibilities for turning an image into a multimedia rich learning tool.

Many members of the ThingLink EDU community submitted ThingLink powered App Smashes to our App Smash Channel and several ThingLink Expert Educators shared their expertise through one of three webinars we offered. In case you missed it, here are resources from our culminating App Smash webinar. Be sure to watch the archived webinar found at the bottom of this post to listen to our Expert Educators describe their amazing AppSmashes.    

App Smashing with ThingLink and Explain Everything

This very simple example demonstrates how to combine the best features of ThingLink and Explain Everything to help students construct knowledge and demonstrate deep learning. Students can use the built-in web browser and recording features in Explain Everything to create a narrated guided tour of a ThingLink interactive image. The resulting video can be shared through Google Drive or published on YouTub. In this example, the video created with Explain Everything is embedded back on to the ThingLink image through a Rich Media Tag. Explore this interactive image to learn more.

• ThingLink
• Explain Everything

Famous Monuments of the Ancient World

Jamie Forshey created this example of a student project for use with 6th grade social studies teachers and their students for use as a culminating project to highlight their unit of study on Ancient Civilizations.  The project was designed for students to share an element of culture from each of the 4 regions studied. Research, mapping and creative design were combined to create their multimedia projects. Explore this interactive image and follow Jamie at @edutech20.

• Photo Mapo
• Pic Collage
• ThingLink

Creative Writing with Book Creator and Scene Maker

Laura Moore shared an example of ways students can create their own visual writing prompts using graphics from various scene maker apps and then publish personal narratives using the Book Creator app. When students complete their own books in Book Creator, they can be combined together to make one collaborative book. Here is a list of the scene maker apps students used to create their own visual writing prompts. Explore this interactive image and follow Laura @LearnMooreStuff

• Book Creator

• Ultimate Scene Maker 

• Feltz  or Feltz Lite

• Creative Pad

• Toontastic Jr.

• Epic Citadel

• Create a Scene

• ThingLink

 The Smash Pub

Lori Campbell and her team of instructional technologiests at Northern Virginia Community College created this AppSmash for use as a self-directed professional learning activity to present simple apps that students and faculty could mix together easily to create something unique. She creatively grouped apps and presented them with catchy names to provide learners with a starting point for exploring and creating. Explore this interactive image and follow Lori @CampbellLori2

Digital & Analog #TLAppSmash Recipe

Meghan Zigmond created an AppSmash with her 1st grade students to take advantage of their natural excitement for taking pictures and used it to dig deeper into comprehension. As Meghan read aloud, students created drawings to docuement their thinking and mental imagary. They took pictures of their drawings to turn their analog images into digital images. Once the mental images were on the iPad they used Pic Collage to combine them together into one collage. Finally they use the Audio Boom App to  record explanations of their thinking.  Explore this interactive image and follow Meghan at @ZigZagsTech

• Camera
• Pic Collage
• audioBoom
• ThingLink

Heritage Project

Dan Gallagher worked with 3rd grade teachers and students to smash apps together to create a Heritage Project which required students to research their family’s heritage, guided by question packets. This project was created in a 4:1 classroom environment so the use of DrobBox for storage was a must. To overcome the obstacles of trying to gather staff members together for training, Dan used ThingLink for video to create instructional materials for teachers. Here is a list of the apps used for this project.  Explore this interactive image and follow Dan @Gallagher_Tech

• Logo Maker – design logo to represent their self (image will be ThingLink background)
• ScreenChomp – screencast describing their logo
• Voice Recorder Pro 7 – used to record their name story, included a self-portrait drawing
• LayerPic HD – superimposed two pictures
  • Screenshot of their family’s native country (iPad native Maps app)
  • Picture of the country’s flag (searched using Safari)
• Tellagami – create a ‘narrator’ telling their family’s immigration story
• Green Screen by Do Ink – combine their Tellagami video with a video showing a plane, boat, train, car, or any other mode of transportation used to arrive in the US
• Pic Collage – hand drawn family crest with other images combined into one picture used for VRP 7 recording of their family’s custom or tradition
• ThingLink