Thinkalink is a highly original and enjoyable interactive mechanism designed to help children or adults commit a virtually unlimited range of facts to memory. Be it the meaning of words, Kings and Queens of England, the Periodic Table, or the value of properties on a Monopoly board, Thinkalink provides a compelling alternative to the tedious convention of learning by rote.
Pithy mnemonics that are clever, funny, varied, and strikingly original help to keep facts in the memory bank for life.
Here are a couple of examples...
Liaise has 2 "i"s in it, not one:
To liaise, we need to meet i 2 i.
The metacarpal bone is in the hand:
I "met a couple" last week; charming they were. And what was the first thing we did? Why, shake hands of course!
How Thinkalink works:
Thinkalink is a website allowing people (linkers) to help others (learners or casual readers) to remember facts. The site is very much an interactive and dynamic forum, where visitors can either rate a link out of ten or submit their own alternative link, which will in turn be rated by other participants.
At a pre-announced cut-off date, the most popular link for each fact will be included in the Thinkalink book, along with the name of the individual who submitted the link.
Useful categories for English students & teachers:
Learning by rote, mind-mapping or overlong acronyms can be dull. If a method can put the fun back into learning, with audience participation, then that has to be a good thing. I was talking to a teacher friend, who says that they don't really get children to go home and learn lots of things and test them the next day any more, which was depressing to hear. If you said to your students...
"Go home tonight and see if you can come up with a link for, say, that the Wright Brothers invented the plane, or that Fagin was a character from Oliver Twist"... it would get their minds thinking laterally, and they would learn a fact or two along the way!
I have a lovely story about a 13-year-old autistic child who created a great link for World War II taking place between 1939 & 1945. His teacher said that giving him public recognition (his name is on the site), as well as confidence, has to be a good thing!
Advice to students:
Visit our website (www.thinkalink.co.uk) and get started by clicking on "Categories" at the top to begin rating links out of ten. Try to learn five facts a day and go on from there. If you can think of a good link for a particular fact then submit it by registering on the site here and let's see what the public thinks! This is a new way to remember things, which really makes learning fun!
Watch our video for more info!
Biography:
Andy Salmon is one of six children, who were brought up in Wimbledon, London. After dropping out of university he spent ten successful years in the money markets as a foreign exchange broker. After leaving the markets in 1998, he ran his own recruitment company, specialising in I.T. & Sales, but has now given that up to work full-time on Thinkalink. Ever since his father introduced him to crosswords in his early teens, Andy has loved playing with words. He dreamt up the idea for Thinkalink in 1995 when, casually flicking through an atlas, he began to learn the capital cities of countries by using word association. Andy lived in London until last year, when he decided to move to Sussex with his wife Alex, to give them and their six-year-old triplets some room to breathe!
English Banana Promotions: do you have a website that you'd like us to promote, with its own dedicated page on englishbanana.com - something like this one - plus a home page link? With monthly page views of over 2.5 million, and hundreds of thousands of students and teachers clicking on our site every month, maybe we can help you to promote your website? If you would like to find out more, please do get in touch!
