ThingLink Spotlight! Lighting Up Immersive Learning with Micaela Barbuzzi
ThingLink Luminaries is a series of guest blog posts highlighting certified trainers who are creating interactive and immersive experiences to make learning more engaging, accessible, and meaningful. Our educators and learning designers bring a thoughtful approach to immersive learning, and their work reflects a deep commitment to creativity, pedagogy, and innovation.
In each profile post, we’ll explore their background, teaching philosophy, and favorite ThingLink projects—offering insight into how they’re making a lasting impact in their classrooms, organizations and communities! Enjoy!
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Introducing Micaela
I am a Psychologist, a teacher in the K12 curriculum specialized in Montessori differentiated teaching and a trainer passionate about innovation, I create educational experiences that combine creativity and technology. My head is often between pixels, interactive maps and immersive worlds! I am an Ambassador of wonderful Ed-Tech Apps that increase competence, collaboration and inclusion I am a ThingLink Trainer with a passion for digital storytelling, I love turning every lesson into an adventure. I am always looking for new ideas to experiment and share, because school is the place where magic meets reality. For me, school is a laboratory of ideas where theoretical concepts come to life from the experience of doing and living learning concretely.
Micaela’s ThingLink Project
I created this Thinglink for my students: mathematics with emotions! We know how much children today need to understand and deal with their own and other people’s emotions and so through this Thinglink we offer them the opportunity to deal with the so-called “strong” emotions that we mathematics teachers know well! But thanks to Thinglink even mathematics will have a different flavor especially if immersive and engaging.
What inspired you to create this project?
I was inspired by the daily need to deal with emotions and why not combine it with some healthy fun mathematics?!?!
What was the feedback from your students?
It was my students who gave me feedback on the work. They “played” it over and over again even with their families and asked me to make more because “this is how we like to do math” words of my students!
Do you have another project you’d like to share?
In this other Thinglink instead they talk about the Great Migration of Animals. I represented it on a Word Map to make it more realistic. I haven’t shown it to my students yet but I can’t wait to do it. I’ll give them a big surprise! Here there are explanatory videos and realistic images that with the immersive experience that Thinglink guarantees will be another highly engaging work.
What do you love about ThingLink?
Using Thinglink is a lot of fun for me. While I’m creating it I always keep in mind the recipients, that is, who it’s aimed at, and in this way I can also optimize the experience at best. I try to insert what I think is most captivating and that in the end is not just a nice experience, but a nice enriching experience, engaging and accessible to everyone.
Fun Fact and Connect with Micaela
I have more colored pens than socks… And I can’t use just one app at a time: I make them work as a team as if they were digital superheroes! I once had dinner in front of an interactive map thinking it was Netflix!
🔗 Connect with Micaela via LinkedIn
