ThingLink is a popular tool for collaboratively creating interactive images. Now, you can use ThingLink to create interactive videos too. ThingLink Video (still in beta, but you can register for early access here) allows you to select any public video on YouTube and add interactive pinmarks to it. Each pinmark can contain embeds of other videos, maps, text, and links to other pages of information. Learn more about the ThingLink video in the video below.

I received early access to ThingLink Video and tried it today. The first thing that I tried was taking the video of John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address and adding pinmarks to it. I added a pinmark over Lyndon Johnson so that students could click to learn more about the Vice President. Then I took my newly annotated video and added it to a picture of JFK giving his inaugural address.

Applications for Education
ThingLink Video could be a great tool for students to use to add additional information to Animoto videos or other audio slideshow videos that they publish on YouTube. Animoto and similar tools are nice for creating short presentations but they don’t offer much in the way of opportunity for sharing additional information about each image in a video. Putting their audio slideshow videos into ThingLink Video is one way that students could enhance their video projects.