Skip to main content

Posts

Book Creator Introduction Lesson(s)

  One of my favorite online creation tools is Book Creator . It allows students to create interactive multimedia ebooks based off classroom assignments. The FREE version allows teachers to have one library with 40 books. Teachers can archive libraries and delete books and reset the library count to 40 as needed. Obviously the ideal situation is to get a classroom, school, or district subscription  and it is something to recommend to administrators, PTA's, or even make a grant pitch for.  I am a certified Google Trainer and Book Creator has very generously offered up their 1,000 book library deal to anyone with that designation, which makes it very nice for training purposes. Here are a few books I have made for demonstration purposes: Plastic Bags   Showing Respect in the Halls (Comic Example) Choose Your Own Adventure Style Book Biography (Bessie Coleman) Community Helpers (link to Facebook post...this is a project I completed with a kindergarten class) Because I...

Animated GIF Stickers

I have been using GIF's for awhile to provide fun feedback to students but I never thought of putting them into a "sticker" format before.  The idea was presented in a session I attended recently at GaETC21 (Georgia EdTech Conference 2021) and I LOVED it.  The conference session was presented by Meredith White  a high school Spanish teacher from Georgia. She got the idea and template from Ester Park and ran with it sharing how she used her stickers with students to provide engaging feedback.  Ms. Park provides a video overview of the process and I created my own video , just in case her video ever went down, and to share more specific details with teachers in my district.  In all my samples I used Ms. Park's sticker template. If you wanted to change it up they seem pretty simple to make. It looks like she did her wording in another program and inserted them as a picture but I used Google fonts with Google Word Art for the most part in my sample above.  I'...

Fun Staff Photos

  With masking requirements being implemented across states, prior to the start of the 2021-2022 school year, I was looking for a creative way to share a department photo without actually having to put anyone in close contact.  Last year I created a fun Brady Bunch style picture but I really like the comic book style this year.  For anyone wishing to duplicate it there were a few steps. The first is obviously to get pictures of your team. I had some from previous years and I started stalking Facebook for some backups. Once I had the pictures saved I emailed them to myself so I could open them up on my phone and save the pictures to my camera roll. I used the app " Photo Lab " to "cartoon" the pictures. It is free with in-app purchases but you may have to wade through quite a few advertisements. I never paid for any features. It is not super intuitive to use so I made this short 2 minute video .  I took screen shots of the finished cartoons versus saving to my camera...

End of Year Digital Yearbook w/ Jamboard

You can use Jamboard to create digital year books that can be individually printed out and gifted to students at the end of school year.  This project can be done in Google Slides as well, however Jamboard does offer a couple of advantages. Jamboard slides (or frames) are hidden so it is slightly more difficult to accidentally delete slides (this make collaborating easier). Jamboard offers a drawing and sticky note tool which Google Slides does not.  Unfortunately Jamboard has very limited text sizing, font, and color so I actually set up the names, school, and year in Google Slides and used those as the uneditable backgrounds in Jamboard.   Once the project is complete the teacher can edit and move things around if it needs to be "cleaned up" before printing.  For my "how to" instructions with screenshots click on THIS LINK .  If you use this idea I would love to hear your feedback! You can comment below or tag me on Twitter @atechcoachlife . 

Online Safety Presentation - A to Z

  I recently finished an Online Awareness: Internet Safety and Digital Citizenship course as part of a online teaching endorsement program (specific to the state of South Carolina).  Our final project was to make a presentation. I created an Online A to Z Guide to internet safety that turned out super cute and one I have shared with numerous people.   I used icons from The Noun Project . A couple of years ago I bought a subscription for $19 a year and I have made so many great flyers with their graphics that it was worth the cost...particularly for my job. You can use their icons for free but you must site your source and you have some other limitations. The design idea after taking an online Classy Graphics course with Tony Vincent I included embedded videos on several slides. I would recommend watching them before showing to students (and to verify the links are still good).     - To preview the full presentation CLICK HERE . - To make a copy of the ...

Animal Face Project - Green Screen

  I recently worked with a Media Specialist to recreate a project she saw on Twitter  with second graders. It was ridiculously cute!  We used green masks ( Amazon link  - these masks didn't have a white strip on the top or bottom), a green screen (we had a popup green screen but green cloth would work), and the Doink green screen iPad app  (worth the $4.99 price tag...you can use it on an iPhone or iPad). We replaced student mouths with animal mouths in conjunction with the read aloud "What If You Had Animal Teeth?" The book features ten animal mouths but we reduced student choices to eight. I tested out all the animal mouths on us first to have samples for the students and to see which ones might give us the most trouble. The narwhal and the rattlesnake were hard to manipulate so we pulled them as choices.  Most of the students selected the same thing - sharks and tigers - which was a little disappointing because the elephant one was so adorable. To add va...

If I Had a Pot of Gold...St. Patrick's Day Activity

 Need a fun digital writing prompt for St. Patrick's day? Try this "If I had a pot of Gold" activity. The fun, and techie part, requires students to take a picture of themselves, use the site remove.bg to remove the background and edit around the face, and then layer it within the hat and beard clipart.  To encourage more writing and detail I made the "pot of gold" cursed so that in order to get what you want you have to do something nice with the some of the gold and tell me what and why. Here are some student samples from a fifth grade class: I didn't do this with the group I worked with but you can have them add in their Leprechaun name using this name generator I found online.   In the "If I had a pot of gold" template ( CLICK HERE TO OPEN ) I have an instructional video on the first slide and some "good" and "bad" writing samples ( CLICK HERE TO OPEN LINK TO VIDEO ONLY ). IMPORTANT NOTE:  You will need to make a copy of bo...