Thematic is a simple service designed for creating and sharing picture stories. Thematic allows you to display up to twenty pictures organized around a theme of your choosing. You can add a line or two of text to each image in your story. Your completed story is displayed in a vertically scrolling format with each of your images occupying all of the available space in your browser. Completed stories can be shared publicly or kept private. Each public story can be shared via Twitter, Facebook, email, or embedding into a webpage. In the video embedded below I provide a demonstration of how to create a story on Thematic.
Applications for Education
Thematic could be a good service to use to tell a story about the highlights of a field trip, a research assignment, or a school event. It could also be useful for creating assignments in which students put together a visual timeline of events. Ask students to find pictures related to an event or theme, organize the pictures chronologically, then label them as needed. Students could also use Thematic to create a short biography as I did in the story embedded below.