ThingLink at ISTE 2024

ThingLink Team June 24, 2024

Our team is excited to be back at ISTE, and we look forward to reconnecting with old friends and meeting new ones in Denver, Colorado! Here are some topics and highlights we’d like to share with you:

1) A quick update: What’s new at ThingLink?

ThingLink’s suite of immersive content creation tools has expanded from image annotation and virtual tour creation to transforming any digital or physical space into an interactive learning experience. With virtual field trips and simulations, we help students access real-life environments from any device. In those real-life environments, we augment physical objects with a digital layer.

Our team remains committed to:

• Making digital learning experiences interactive
• Making real-life contexts accessible digitally to support learning
• Providing students with new ways to express themselves, achieve learning outcomes, and develop essential digital skills
• Developing tools that save teachers time
• Making immersive learning accessible on any device, platform, or language

Read more about how How ThingLink Made an Art Exhibition More Accessible at Ohio State University’s College of Arts and Sciences. 

2) K-12: Student creation: Why is it important? 

Virtual field trips and other immersive learning experiences provide students with engaging, meaningful contexts that help them understand, memorize, and apply new information. Students enjoy them, but the learning opportunity doesn’t stop there! Equipping students with immersive content creation tools helps them transition from consumers to creators, engaging in higher-order cognitive tasks such as analysis and problem-solving.

Examples of student-driven projects and applicable tools include:

1. Documenting existing projects 
2. Digital storytelling 
3. Creating escape rooms and 
4. Virtual field trips.

An ongoing research project at the Stanford University School of Education focuses on studying how creating and sharing a Virtual Field Trip (VFT) impacts learning, and what particular features of a Virtual Field Trip lead to better learning.  Their research team has created a publicly available Virtual Field Trips Resource Guide that features student- and educator-facing materials to support the design of Virtual Field Trips. If you are looking for well-designed lesson plans and other resources for student-led immersive content creation, this is a truly wonderful resource!

The virtual field trips project is an interdisciplinary effort uniting faculty, research staff, students, and design and technology experts across the Stanford campus.

Generative AI for creativity

ThingLink’s recent GenAI update includes new ways for creating original and engaging images and 360 images, but this is only the beginning. This year, together with the amazing team at Blockade Labs , we are planning to provide students with even more inspiring examples and new amazing ways for recreating and sharing their environment in 360 and 3D.

In this way we are empowering students with a safe generative AI solution that can bring digital storytelling to a whole new level, and ensure that learning game development is accessible to all.

Watch: Our most recent webinar about creating escape rooms 

3) Higher and Vocational Education: In-context skills development in mixed reality environments

Courses aimed at developing students’ technical, operational, or social skills benefit greatly from access to real-life environments where students can observe or practice situations. An increasing number of vocational and higher education organizations are planning to include immersive courses in their curriculum over the coming school year.

Beyond improving the learning experience, one of the main drivers for transitioning text- and video-based materials into various types of immersive learning environments is the data they provide for learning optimization.

At ThingLink, AI already empowers learning content creation in multiple ways, including

• Base media creation and
• Tag suggestions, questions and branch generation, and copy re-writing and recapping.

At ISTE, we are excited to share news about our upcoming Immersive Course Creator that helps convert PDFs and slideshows into interactive, visual learning modules. The new Immersive Course Creator is ideal for scaling the creation of immersive learning materials, including

• Virtual onboarding for new students or staff
• Any kind of technical or safety training
• Operational skills development
• Simulations

Interested in testing the new Immersive Course Creator? Request access using this form.

4) ThingLink Certified Trainers at ISTE!

ISTE is a great place to meet with other ThingLink users, Certified Creators and Trainers.

Don’t miss: ThingLink Certified Trainer Craig Dunlap at ISTELive, Tuesday 4:30 pm! See below for all the details. We hope to see you there!

To learn more about these updates and wonderfully inspiring examples of student creation, make sure to see ThingLink Chief Community Officer Louise Jones presenting at the BenQ stand on Tuesday from 1200 -1210, and on Monday and Tuesday at the ClassVR stand 1330 – 1400. As to partnerships, ping Jonathan Hull and for demos and account activations, we have also Joel Price on the ground! Enjoy ISTE and hope to see you soon!

Original blog post/article by Ulla Maaria Koivula, CEO and Founder of ThingLink.