Tuesday, December 2, 2014

An ELT Thinglink for Christmas, or Rudolph gets a ELT Nosejob.

Again it's Christmas, the most consumer loving time of the year. Make it a goal to make- not purchase- a gift for at least one person this year. If you are a good maker, make it for someone you like.

Again it's Christmas and it was Monday so ELT Ireland were doing their #ELTChinwag. (not chat). Last night on Twitter, Peter Lahiff mentioned he was trying to use a new app for word clouds. I think word clouds should be used only rarely and mostly after you've just discovered Wordle.

But it's the holidays.

He sent me a sample of what he wanted to make.

I complained that it had no red nose.

He made some crack about my design sensibilities. He forgot I have this blog.
Note: No nose.

Let's review: If the words in the visual refer back to 'the red-nosed reindeer' it should- you know- have the red nose.

It's not like Rudolph is ashamed of this feature. Would Frosty be happy if you photoshopped his button nose?

So, Photoshop: I put the nose back on.






Note: Nose. Mine is blue because I used a screen shot of Peter's instead of downloading.
And it needs the song. The teacher will be looking for it anyway. So can we stick a song in the picture?  Is fĂ©idir linn, baby.


Again I go back to Paul Driver. He introduced us to Thinglink in one of his talks at the Digital ELT Ireland conference. It lets you add little hotspot links to an image you upload.  So I uploaded my Rudolph to Thinklink.

So I placed a hotspot link on the nose and changed the icon to a circle with a red border. I set the link to a YouTube version of the Rudolph with lyrics.

But the song is really just a souvenir of the 1964 stop-motion animation tv special* for me.

So also I gave RTRNR (completely unnecessary acronym) an eye which is a link to a full version of RTRNR (I love this silly acronym as much as I like the film) on DailyMotion so that learners can go enjoy it at home. The videolink is in an eye because... you... watch... stuff... with... your eyes.

 The finished Thinglink lives in my pitifully shoddy Thinglink page. But here's a link so you can put this RTRNR thinglink in your class blog for your learners or those teachers you share stuff with.

EMBED Link

<img style="max-width:100%" src="//cdn.thinglink.me/api/image/596269464324931584/1024/10/scaletowidth#tl-596269464324931584;1043138249'" class="alwaysThinglink"/><script async charset="utf-8" src="//cdn.thinglink.me/jse/embed.js"></script>

Note: Nose

If you'd prefer the iframe embedded version try the codey goop below. Just copy and paste. The iframe code is what I used to get the actual interactive version below. The only advantage seems to be you can see and play with the interactive hotspots in the blogger interface as you are writing, whereas the embed link above seems like a static image.

Switch your blog view from 'Compose' to 'HTML,' copy the code and paste it in your blog post's code. That allows the codey magic to to shine... just like noble Rudolph's light guiding us on to a brighter felizier navidad.

IFRAME Link

<iframe width="313" height="398" src="//www.thinglink.com/card/596269464324931584" type="text/html" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen scrolling="no"></iframe>

IFRAME Link added in HTML



*This little retro jewel and maker's inspiration was made by a company called Rankin/Bass which even in the 60s and 70s was outsourcing their work to Japanese animators some of which went on to work for the mighty Miyazaki, a total legebag as young D4 Dubliners might say. 

1 comment:

  1. Very cool! Will use it this week in class to get some singing going.

    ReplyDelete

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