UNESCO ICT Prize laureate ThingLink supporting teachers amid the COVID-19 crisis
In the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak, classes in Romania have been suspended as of 11 March 2020.
To ensure the continuation of education, the Finnish education technology company ThingLink, laureate of the 2018 UNESCO King Hamad Bin Isa-Al Khalifa Prize for the use of ICT in Education, is collaborating with the educational technology hub AR Studio based in Budapest to help teachers create curriculum aligned resources for online learning. This includes training educators to create virtual lessons, interactive videos, and other resources that capture teacher’s instructions to students.
The ThingLink software enables teachers to enrich content such as video lessons with text, voice or video notes explaining key concepts and vocabulary or linking to sources and relevant materials.
“We are fully committed to work with AR Studio and support their initiative to quickly equip Romanian teachers with both essential tools and skills for online content creation”, says Ulla-Maaria Koivula, the founder and CEO of ThingLink.
For the next months, AR studio is giving free access for teachers to their facilities including free access to the ThingLink software so that teachers can record video lessons to share with their students. The content created by individual teachers and AR Studio will be freely accessible to teachers in Romania
ThingLink Launches ‘Donate Lesson’ Option to Support Global Teacher Collaboration.
ThingLink also announced a new feature allowing teachers to make materials freely accessible for their colleagues and their students around the world.
This new feature, called “Donate lessons”, enables teachers and eLearning account holders on ThingLink to share their images, videos or virtual tours to a free database of curriculum-aligned learning materials.
When sharing content, teachers can choose which level and subject their work belongs to, as well as add keywords to help categorize it appropriately. Each submission will be reviewed by members of the ThingLink community. Once the submission is approved, the author will get an approval notification and Thinglink’s Global Educator badge.
“With the new donate feature, our hope is to bring together the global educator community, and to show how despite – and because of – the circumstances, teachers in different countries keep innovating new ways for connecting and working with their students”, says ThingLink CEO Ulla-Maaria Koivula.
The founder of the Finnish education technology company hopes that these innovative practices will carry on after the situation normalizes, “bringing more flexibility for working and studying remotely.”