Visual Reinforcements: Made by Students, Featuring Students!
Presenter: Mary Goslin, St. Brendan School
Imagine the walls of your classroom spotlighting your students with eye-catching instructional guides! This is interactive learning at it's best. Simply photograph your students as they are engaged in an exploratory learning activity. Using these photos, create a colorful visual by making a poster, guide or slideshow. Allow the students to collaborate in formulating the text to best explain the learning process that they experienced during the activity. Creating the guide together reinforces the skills and concepts as the students actively re-teach and revisit their strategies. Posting the guides in the room and on Edmodo gives the students access to tutorials that they connect with on a personal level! The following iPad apps are FREE!
Doodle Buddy for iPad
"Doodle Buddy for iPad is the most fun you can have with your finger--heck, it’s the most fun you can have with all your fingers! Finger paint with thousands of colors and drop in playful stamps" (2013). Teachers can create posters or displays with unique backgrounds, photos from their camera roll, or silly stamps. With Doodle Buddy, a teacher can add text by typing or drawing onto the image. |
Chatstick
"Every picture has its own story...enhance that story with amazing chat bubbles. Recreating what happened in your pics has never been easier...so start by customizing your own chat bubbles TODAY...the possibilities are endless!" (2013). Teachers can make a collage using photos from their library, Facebook, or Flickr. It enables users to easily enlarge or decrease photo size & move photos around for best placement. Choose from a wide selection of backgrounds and use various speech bubbles! Additionally, teachers can add colored text from many font choices and save work to their photo library or share it via email. |
Pic Collage
"PicCollage lets you instantly arrange your photos into frames - or get creative with freeform collages, cutouts, filters, borders, stickers, and text. Your friends will be amazed with what you can create. It's like photoshop with your fingers!" (2013) Teachers can design collages using numerous formats. Choose any number of colorful backgrounds, add your own photos or pictures from the web, apply stickers and colorful text that can be easily placed and sized. Save your work to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, your photo library or email! |
Snapguide
"Description Snapguide is a simple, beautiful way to share and view step-by-step how to guides. Discover new things to cook, build, wear, play and more. Create your own guides and share what you love making with your friends on Twitter, Facebook and more. Discuss your interests with other people who share your passions" (2013). Teachers can create a "how to" slideshow guide using new or used photos from their library. Use as a slideshow or take a screen shot of each slide to make a classroom display. Classroom Example: Here is an example of my guide on How to Use Base Ten Blocks. It can also be viewed online here. |
Haiku Deck
"Haiku Deck is the simple and fun new way to create stunning presentations – whether you’re pitching an idea, teaching a lesson, telling a story, or igniting a movement. Featured on the iTunes “New and Noteworthy” and “What’s Hot” lists, Haiku Deck makes it fast and fun to create beautifully designed slideshows you’ll be proud to share" (2013). Create a slideshow by choosing the layout of your text, use photos from your library, Facebook, Instagram, Dropbox, Flickr, or your Google Docs. Your slideshow can be shared on Edmodo, used as a lesson tool, or take a screen shot of each slide for classroom display. Classroom Example: Here is an example of my Haiku Deck on Telling Time. |