Bring the Textbook to Life & Explore Living in the US

Join us in an exciting ThingLink Classroom Creative Challenge to build interactive books about Living in the US. This is a great end of year project that's loaded with learning and offers a high level of student interest. Help us to put your state and school on the map!

Let's Bring the Textbook to Life as we explore Living in the US!

About the Classroom Creative Challenge

8 Week Simple Collaborative Project 

The purpose of the project is to create interactive books about living in the The United States. For a period of 8 weeks, each Monday we will have a new question for your classroom, such as “What kinds of plants grow on your schoolyard?” or “What do you eat for breakfast?”.

ThingLink’s editorial team will collect each week’s submissions into an interactive book that reflects differences and similarities in the way we live and in different parts of the the US. In the end of the school year, ThingLink’s educational community manager Susan Oxnevad will compile an entire nation-wide Living in the US Interactive Book featuring the content you and your classrooms have created. This resource can be shared with parents and school district administrators as well as used as a wonderfully engaging teaching resource in the classroom in the fall 2015!

Classroom Creative Challenge Week 1

Show Us Your School

Grab your mobile device and take some snapshots of your school. Annotate it with an image on top of an image to highlight areas. Focus on writing clear and concise labels to explain the image.

Steps at a Glance

1. Take photos of your school (e.g. school yard, buildings, special characteristics that are unique to your school. Please follow your school's guidelines for publish images of students.)
2. Add images to ThingLink.com
3. Annotate your school photos with images on top of images, video, notes, even audio, or Google Docs if you like!
4. Choose one main image of your school, and link all the other ThingLink images of the different parts to the main image
5. Add a tag to include the following information to identify your school
   
   1. Classroom Name
   2. School
   3. City -State -Zip -
   4. Date
   5. Use the hashtag #LivingInUS
6. Submit your main image to the Classroom Creative Challenge through the Creative Challenges Tool. (Just click on the Share button on your ThingLink and copy the link, then paste it into our creative challenges tool to submit your image)

Click to submit

Project Organization

There are several ways to organize the creative challenge in the classroom. Here are some ideas and tips for a lesson plan depending on if you are working in small groups with several iPads or with individual students.

Watch our Channel Grow!

After each week, the ThingLink editorial team will collect submissions to an interactive book and share it with the participants! Explore our collection of images submitted to this challenge so far and watch it grow!

Resources

• Lesson Plan for taking the Living in the US Creative Classroom challenge
• ThingLink Classroom SignUp WorkFlow - A guided presentation
• Manage Your Verified District Organization - A playlist of ThingLink for Video Tutorials
• ThingLink Help Center - Visit our frequently updated help section.
• Create a ThingLink for EDU
  
  
  

We look forward to learning more about your school and classrooms! Questions? Contact susan@thinglink.com.