Bridging Educational Divides Through ThingLink Virtual Field Trips at the University of Arizona

Kyla Ball June 11, 2026

Background

Christopher Sanderson, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Sociocultural Studies in the College of Education at the University of Arizona, where he serves as a full-time faculty member in a teacher preparation program that serves students across Arizona. His courses focus on preparing pre-service teachers — future educators who will go on to teach in their own classrooms, often in historically underinvested communities.

Introduced to ThingLink around 2018, Dr. Sanderson began exploring the platform as a tool to help his pre-service teacher students create virtual field trips for the young learners they would one day teach.

Challenge: The Experience Gap

Dr. Sanderson identified three challenges in his teaching practice.

The first two were geographic and socioeconomic. Working with students in rural areas meant that both his pre-service teachers and the children they would eventually teach had students whose geographic context offered different access to certain experiences. Some do not have the immediate opportunity to visit iconic natural landmarks, major cultural institutions, or international destinations.

The third challenge was pedagogical. Dr. Sanderson was determined to move beyond using technology as a one-off activity with little lasting instructional value. He wanted his pre-service teachers to engage with technology in a way that was meaningfully integrated across subject areas, grounded in educational research, and transferable to their own future classrooms. Pre-made, generic lesson content was not a suitable solution because it lacked the contextual relevance required for specific student populations.

Solution: ThingLink

Dr. Sanderson wanted a platform that could genuinely transform how his students thought about teaching. After researching digital tools, he adopted ThingLink as a platform for his pre-service teacher trainees to design and build their own virtual field trips. Rather than consuming ready-made content, they are required to create original, contextually grounded experiences — drawing on their own communities, neighborhoods, and lived environments as source material. This approach reflects the well-established educational concept of “learning through creation,” in which the act of designing instructional content for others demands a deeper engagement with the subject matter than can be provided by passive study alone. ThingLink creates pathways to experiences that complement what students already bring from their own communities and personal experiences.

The student teachers must photograph or source their own images where possible, embedding layered multimedia content using ThingLink’s tagging and tour features, and produce work that is genuinely representative of and relevant to the specific school pupils who will use it. Dr. Sanderson’s assignment requirements generally include a minimum of three tagged interactions per image, though his students routinely produce five to ten. These can include text, images, videos, Google Docs, and Google Forms for assessment, audio recordings, and a range of external links. The students often use ThingLink’s locked mode, a sequential navigation feature, to guide end users through content in a deliberate order.

Above: An example of one of the student-created virtual field trips, by Aldo

Audio recording has emerged as a particularly significant feature. Dr. Sanderson considers it one of ThingLink’s most valuable tools, offering a more personal and accessible experience than text-based tags alone — an important consideration when creating and developing multiple modalities that support all learners.

ThingLink’s Key Benefits as an Education Platform: Conclusions from the College of Education 

Increased Equity and Access Through Virtual Tours and Field Trips

ThingLink has enabled the education students at the University of Arizona to bring distant, otherwise inaccessible environments into the classroom. For children from rural or smaller communities, this represents meaningful access to experiences that would not otherwise be available to them. Dr. Sanderson views this capacity to break down socioeconomic barriers as one of ThingLink’s many valuable contributions to enhancing education.

Above: An example of one of the student-created virtual field trips, by Riley Buckley

Deeper Subject Knowledge Through Design 

The art of building a virtual field trip for younger students requires pre-service teachers to become genuinely fluent in their content areas. Explaining complex topics to a child audience forces a level of clarity and mastery that traditional assignments do not. Students consistently demonstrate greater comprehension as a result of the ThingLink creation process itself.

Authentic, Relevant and Contextual Student-Centered Pedagogy

Because each ThingLink project is built around a student’s own images, community, and context, the resulting resources are inherently more relevant to the classrooms they will eventually serve than any commercially produced alternative. This aligns directly with the research-backed principle that contextualized learning materials produce stronger outcomes.

Inclusivity for Creators Through Multimedia Formats

ThingLink’s easy-to-use voice recording feature is just one way that it makes content more accessible and usable across different learning needs and literacy levels, extending content creation to a broader user base without requiring any additional tools or workarounds.

Every Student Deserves a Bigger World

Dr. Sanderson’s work exemplifies a teacher who genuinely cares about opening doors for his students, and the creative ways he uses ThingLink reflect a deep commitment to meaningful learning. It is worth remembering that much of what makes this approach so effective is the thoughtful teaching behind it. The idea that students learn best by creating, not just consuming, is a powerful one that can be supported by a variety of tools. The story also celebrates what students bring from their own neighborhoods and communities, and there is a real opportunity to lean into that even more.

Future Plans: Incorporating the Newest ThingLink Features

Dr. Sanderson plans to extend his use of ThingLink into a summer program focused on creating 3D images and AR experiences, further deepening the immersive potential of student-created content with the platform. 

“Using tools like ThingLink helps create meaningful experiential learning opportunities in which students actively engage with content rather than simply consuming information. Interactive experiences foster creativity, curiosity, and deeper understanding while giving learners greater ownership and agency in the learning process. It is important that teachers themselves become the creators and developers of these experiences because they are best positioned to design learning that is authentic, relevant, and responsive to the unique needs of their students and communities. I have found that experiential learning tools can help bridge classroom concepts with authentic, real-world exploration in ways that are engaging and accessible to diverse learners.”

Christopher Sanderson, PhD, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Sociocultural Studies in the College of Education at the University of Arizona