ThingLink Spotlight! Lighting Up Immersive Learning with Gemma Zeeman
ThingLink Luminaries is a series of guest blog posts highlighting certified trainers who are creating interactive and immersive experiences to make learning more engaging, accessible, and meaningful. Our educators and learning designers bring a thoughtful approach to immersive learning, and their work reflects a deep commitment to creativity, pedagogy, and innovation.
In each profile post, we’ll explore their background, teaching philosophy, and favorite ThingLink projects offering insight into how they’re making a lasting impact in their classrooms, organizations and communities! Enjoy!
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Introducing Gemma!
Gemma Zeeman is the founder of Immersive Discoveries and a Certified ThingLink Trainer. Her background spans fifteen years leading large-scale digital programmes at Confused.com — managing cross-functional teams and multi-million-pound budgets — before retraining as a primary school teacher and gaining Qualified Teacher Status through a PGCE with the Open University.
Gemma has taught across Reception to Year 6 in a range of schools. She now runs Immersive Discoveries, designing 360° learning environments for schools, cultural organisations and national bodies, and works as a Research Assistant on the Welsh Government-funded Wales Curriculum Learning Design project. That role involves supporting schools and teacher educators to integrate 360° imagery, AI and emerging technologies into everyday teaching, including developing resources for PGCE students.
Gemma’s Project
The project Gemma is sharing today is a set of immersive 360° environments built in ThingLink for the Welsh Government’s national Hwb platform, designed to make Religious Education genuinely accessible and equitable for every learner.
The project is a set of immersive 360° learning environments built in ThingLink for the Welsh Government’s national Hwb platform, commissioned through Adnodd, the national education resources service.
It covers four religious sites in Cardiff — a Hindu temple, a cathedral, a mosque and a synagogue — alongside a section exploring Humanism, all within a single bilingual (Welsh/English) digital environment. Each space features interactive hotspots with explanatory text, video and audio narration, and embedded escape rooms designed as curriculum-linked knowledge challenges.
What inspired this project?
The resource was built to address a genuine equity gap in Religious Education: giving every pupil access to immersive encounters with diverse worldviews, regardless of what their school can afford, organise, or navigate politically.
The starting point was a brief from Adnodd for an RVE resource. From my experience with ThingLink and 360° cameras, combining the two felt like an obvious fit — places of worship are exactly the kind of spaces that benefit from the sense of presence that 360° creates, and that many schools simply can’t access in person.
Cost is one barrier, but it’s not the only one. In an increasingly polarised climate, some schools are encountering real hesitancy — from parents, governors and sometimes teachers themselves — about taking children to religious sites at all. A virtual environment sits differently: the child isn’t entering a sacred space as a guest or participant, they’re navigating an educational environment about that space, at their own pace, with curriculum-aligned scaffolding. For schools navigating community sensitivity, that distinction can be the difference between a lesson happening or not happening at all. I initially planned to work alone, with a bilingual teacher as QA. But when the brief expanded to include Humanism alongside the faith traditions, I brought in two teachers to work alongside me — and that turned out to be one of the best decisions of the project. Having others to discuss ideas with, bounce things off and check the work from different perspectives made everything stronger.
The collaboration felt genuinely creative rather than just practical. The other thing I hadn’t fully anticipated was the response from the faith leaders themselves. The buy-in from every community we worked with was remarkable — they weren’t just willing to share information, they actively checked through what we’d created to make sure it represented their community and beliefs well. That level of trust and generosity shaped the resource in ways I couldn’t have achieved working from secondary sources alone.
How was the project experienced?
The resource launched on the Welsh Government’s Hwb platform in the first week of April and is now available to every school in Wales through Adnodd. But before that, it was piloted with a Year 6 class, and the response gave us a real sense of what it could do in practice. Pupil ratings were strongly positive, with the majority scoring the experience 4 or 5 out of 5.
The words they chose to describe it — fun, fascinating, immersive, informative — were encouraging, but it was the qualitative comments that stood out. Several pupils described the quality of presence the resource created: “it makes me feel like I am there” and “like I was actually there in real life.” One simply said it was “hard to put down the iPad.”
The escape rooms — interactive knowledge challenges embedded within each environment — proved more powerful as an engagement mechanism than we’d anticipated. As one teacher observed, “the element of being locked really encouraged children to continue to explore the different rooms and learn new information.”
The gamification layer turned exploration from passive browsing into purposeful investigation. Teachers also identified applications that went beyond what the design team had originally envisaged. One suggested pairing pupils who had attended a physical trip with those who hadn’t, giving both a shared list of things to find in the immersive environment — a way to re-engage those who missed the experience and deepen understanding for those who were there. Another highlighted the resource’s potential to support teacher confidence and lesson planning, allowing teachers to familiarise themselves with unfamiliar faith traditions before teaching them. And perhaps the most direct expression of the equity argument came from a pupil comparing it to a conventional school trip: “It is fun going on school trips but this is better because it’s free and faster.”
What do you love about using ThingLink?
One of the things I love most about ThingLink is how naturally collaborative it is. Having the whole team working in the same shared space — accessing, updating and reviewing together in real time — made the creative process genuinely dynamic. Being able to see each other’s contributions and respond to them immediately is something you don’t get with most tools, and it changed how the project felt to make.
What also strikes me every time is how much ThingLink can hold. The possibilities for layering information feel almost endless — which is both its great strength and its greatest temptation. We had to work hard to hold back, and still ended up at roughly double our original word count plan. Knowing when to stop is a discipline the platform quietly tests.
The escape rooms were always part of the vision — inspired by a previous Luminaries post, actually — and building them turned out to be far more intuitive than expected. The locked steps logic clicked quickly, and the 360° library was invaluable for finding the right spaces to set them in. The real revelation of this project, though, was creating 360° video. It was something we hadn’t explored before, and the moment we started working with it, everything opened up. It’s an extraordinarily exciting way to use ThingLink — and it’s given us the spark to want to do much more with it, particularly around music. That’s a thread we’re very much looking forward to pulling on next.
Do you have any other projects in development?
ThingLink has become a go-to tool across very different areas of my work. Most recently I built an AI Toolkit for charity leaders — a curated space designed to give time-poor executives a quick, intuitive way into a complex topic. What I’ve found is that ThingLink’s interactivity has a way of making even dry or unfamiliar subjects genuinely engaging.
There’s something about being able to explore at your own pace, following your own curiosity, that changes the experience entirely. Looking ahead, we’re working on a project around Welsh castles — bringing historical voices to life within immersive environments in a way that connects place, story and curriculum in ways a textbook simply can’t. It’s a project I’m really excited about. But if I’m honest about what I dream of doing in ThingLink, it all comes back to 360° video. Working with it on this project was a revelation, and I haven’t stopped thinking about where it could go. Drone footage over dramatic landscapes. Locations that would be impossible to visit. And music — because what we captured in this project gave me a glimpse of something extraordinary. Imagine a full orchestra, recorded in 360°, where learners can move through the sound, position themselves inside the ensemble, experience it from the conductor’s perspective or from within the strings.
That’s the thing I want to make. ThingLink feels like exactly the right place to do it.
Gemma’s Fun Fact!
Gemma once sang solo in front of over a thousand people at St David’s Hall in Cardiff. She’s still not sure whether that or teaching her first ever lesson to a Year 5 class was more nerve-wracking
Thank You Gemma!
Gemma can be contacted via LinkedIn Immersive Discoveries
