Creating Online Posters

Posters have always been a common way for students to express what they have learned from a research project. However creating posters on poster board is not a skill that will often be asked of our students when they leave the classroom. Creating an digital image or an online poster, however is something that they will do in many different fields and positions. Business owners create images like these ad advertisements. Writers create images like these as book covers. These images can be a way to present information to a client or to spark interest in a new project. And of course graphic designers get paid simply to make images that could be classified as “online posters”.

 

The popularity of websites like Facebook and Pinterest has taught us that images are king in getting our ideas across. Graphic design is a skill that is often not taught until college, even though students could benefit from this knowledge much earlier in their careers. When I worked as a technology teacher for two years, I sponsored a Graphic Design Club for 1st – 5th graders. Students worked through a variety of projects, including making collages, flyers, brochures, presentations and online posters. When I started the club, I always told students that this was a subject that people studied in college and that they could use for a career later on. Creating images is a form of art, but the new technologies out there to create digital images allows students to take their design to a completely different level than they would be able to get with pen and paper

Online posters are one of my favorite forms of Graphic Design because they can be taken a step further than just an image. Students are challenged to create a great image, but they are also challenged to make it interactive. Online posters include links to additional information. Online posters can have links to other websites, videos or audio files. Some programs even allow you to embed videos within the poster. Another possible way to make posters interactive is to include QR codes instead of hyperlinks, making posters printable but still interactive. Or my favorite compromise, include QR codes, but make the QR code clickable so that the poster works in print form or online.

There are many programs that can be used to create online posters. Here are a few: 

Edu Glogster - When I first started having students create online posters, we used Edu Glogster. Of course this was in the days when Edu Glogster was free. When I first signed up I got 100 student accounts for free, later it was 20 and then 10. Now the people at Edu Glogster have realized what an amazing product they have and have started to charge for it. Students can now only create one glog for free on an account they sign up for. However, if the funds are there for your class to use Edu Glogster, I would completely recommend the program.

Prezi - Another great option for online posters is Prezi. This completely free program creates amazing presentations, but can also be used for online posters. Challenge students to create an amazing graphic that can then be made interactive by zooming in or out. Generally when using Prezi to create online posters, you do not want to create a path.

Power Point - Another option is to use Power Point or Google Slides to create your poster. Posters can be created within the program and then saved as a PDF to so that they can still be interactive. If posters are saved as an image file (.png or .jpg) the links will no longer work. This format also will not allow for embedded videos.

Poster Oven – Poster Oven is an online program that can be used to create posters with QR codes. This site gives you great backgrounds and the option to download your poster as a pdf, but the templates cannot be manipulated as easily as some of the other programs.

Online posters can be created about just about any topic that you would like your students to research. Here are a few projects that can be used to help your students create online posters:

Another reason to use online posters is the ability to share these posters digitally. Poster can be e-mailed to parents, showcased on class websites or included in digital portfolios. Paper posters generally get ripped up and thrown away when they can no longer be displayed, but online posters can be kept forever.

Create Global Learners by Connecting with Classes Around the World

For a period of time while I was in teaching in Morocco, I managed a blog called Global Teacher Connect. On this blog, we had monthly collaborative projects where classrooms from around the world could get together to work on projects or connect students in different ways. Unfortunately, life got away from me and  I forgot to pay for the domain name and it was swooped up from under my feet and so the blog is now back to it’s old domain name: http://globalteacherconnect.blogspot.com/. In the meantime, I have also kept a Global Teacher Connect Facebook Page, which has been pretty unactive. I’d like to change that and so I’d like to change that by opening up the page as a place where teachers can connect with other teachers for collaborative projects.

Collaborative projects are a way of connecting students with other student around the world. These projects help give students a chance to connect with and understand students from different cultures and ways of life. By doing this, we open our students up to the possibility that there are other people in the world who do things differently than they do. We open them up to the perspective that other people around the world are more similar to them than different. We open them up to see the world from a different point of view. These connections open up conversations between students of different classes, different races, different cultures and different religions. Knowing people from other cultures makes people less likely to believe stereotypes and hateful messages about people who are different than themselves and more likely to try and see the world through the eyes of others. For a long time, teachers have been using pen pals as a way to connect students to other students around the world. Penpals are a great first step, but with today’s technology there are so many other ways to connect students to other students around the world. Here are a few ways you might consider using to connect your students with other students around the world:

1.) Skype Chats – When I first moved to Morocco a teacher from Canada contacted me because they were studying Morocco and wanted to talk to a class of kids from Morocco. We sent e-mails back and forth two or three times and then we arranged a chat where our kids “met” face to face via computer screen. Her kids taught us a song and my kids taught them a song. Although the arrangement was to teach her kids about Morocco, my kids learned about Canada at the same time. They were amazed to see pictures with piles of snow and loved their virtual tour of the Canadian classroom.
How else could we apply this?
What about talking to students who live on a Native American reservation during our Native American unit? Wouldn’t that be a great way to show students that Native Americans today live just like we do, even though they had different houses long ago?
What about talking to students who live in the Democratic Republic of Congo during a study of the rainforest? Wouldn’t that be a great way to help them understand that people as well as animals live in these areas?
What about a series of chats with classes from different continents during a geography study? Could your class create a map of where each class was located?
For more ideas on how to use Skype in the classroom, check out my blog post – Bringing Experts into Your Classroom with Skype.

2.) Google Doc Collaborative Writing – My oldest son is currently writing a a story with his best friend. We are in South Dakota. She is in North Carolina. Sometimes they set a time and work together. Sometimes they each work when they have time. Either way they are building a chapter book together without actually being together.
How else could we apply this?
How about letting students do research together. They could add to a list of research questions. Then they could answer the questions as they find them and combine the efforts of different students in different places with different sets of resources.
What about a book review document where students from different classes can add reviews of books they have read?
For more ideas on how to use Google Docs, check out my blog post – Using Google Docs to Aid in Collaboration.

3.) Edmodo Book Groups – Within Edmodo you can create groups of students. These groups of students can work together on various projects. Students can be added to groups from any class. This would be the perfect place to host a student book group. Students can read the book in assigned sections and come to the group to answer questions or chat about the book.
How else could we apply this?
What about an author study group? Students could have a group devoted to a particular author. They could come back and work with the same students on different books throughout the course of a school year – or longer!
What about a non-fiction group based on a topic? Say you have kids that are very interested in the Middle Ages, or dinosaurs, or India. Put together a group, with members from at least 2 classes, where students read a bunch of books on that topic and discuss what they learned.
For more ideas on how to use Edmodo in your classroom – check out my blog post: Edmodo Makes my Flipped Classroom Easier.

 4.) Virtual Problem Solving Challenge – A great way for kids to practice math skills is to come up with their own word problems. Students could then share these problems with students from a different class, somewhere else in the world, by posting them on a blog, sending them by e-mail or even putting them into a Google Doc. Kids build critical thinking skills and global thinking all at once.
How else could we apply this?
Allow students to “critique” as well as answer problems created by their friends. This will be a great time to talk about vocabulary that is specific to a region or dialect. It is also a good time to talk about what makes a good world problem.

5.) Collaborative Google Map of a Monuments and National Parks Near Each Class’ Home – Create a Google Map of monuments and national parks near your classroom and then ask other classes to add their own set of monuments and national parks to the map. Monuments and national parks are great ways of knowing what type of things are deemed important to a culture. For example, in Morocco many monuments have religious importance and you will find important mosques and religious schools preserved as “monuments”. In the US religious monuments are rare, but we have a lot of our natural resources set to the side as special and worthy of preserving. There could be some great discussions from maps like these, and by having people of an area designate their monuments, you are getting a picture with less bias than some other resources we could use for similar discussions. Students will study Geography and culture while learning about people from around the world.
How else could we apply this?
What about creating a map of the places you go to buy things? The types of stores and markets in an area will tell you a lot about the economy of an area and could be a great contribution to a study of economics.
What about creating a map of where the food of an area comes from? Students could mark their school and any farms or ranches that are located nearby. This could be a great way to talk about urban/suburban/rural situations as well as how far your food source is in different countries. It’s also a great time to talk about – do we buy from these local farms or do we buy from supermarkets who buy their food from farther away to save costs?

6.) Collaborative Video Creation Projects – There are so many ways to create videos using technology today. For a few ideas of how to make videos with your students – try my Video Creation Websites blog post or my Video Creation iPad Apps blog post. How about having a collaborative YouTube channel with other teachers. Students can create videos. You post them to the YouTube page. Then friends from other classes can go and watch their videos. The friends will learn from the videos and can even leave comments on the video. 
How else could we apply this?
What about having a specific theme to the videos? One of the Global Teachers Connect projects was to create an Earth Day video. In fact, you can still download the project outline for free at my Teachers Pay Teachers store.
How about specifically doing math videos, similar to those at Khan Academy? My kids use this Student Created Video Tutorial Sheet to create math videos to teach each other. Think of how much more we could do with those if we pooled them together!

7.) Create a Padlet to Ask People Questions – Padlet is a website that lets people add their own pictures and notes to your “wall”. Ask a question on it and anyone can answer. Send the question to a “friend” and they can pass it on from there. This could be a great way to gather information for graphs or simply to do a type of “research”, similar to when we put a question out on Facebook to our friends.
How else could we apply this?
How about working on the same project as other classes and asking them to share pictures of their completed projects on your padlet?
Why not ask each class to upload a small video of their classroom and see what classrooms look like around the world?
What about using it as another place to do a book chat? Post questions about a book and ask everyone to go in and add their thoughts.

8.) Create a Collaborative Prezi Presentation – A few years ago I had my students jigsaw information about Ancient Rome. Each group took a different section, home life, government, economics, etc. You can find all of the specifics in this old blog post. Once they had done their research, we put it together into a collaborative prezi presentation. Like Google Docs, you can work in the presentation at the same time, or at different times, but in the end you have one big presentation that everyone has contributed to.
How else could we apply this?
How about creating a research project and grouping students between 2 or more classes based on student interests? Let students break the topic into sections down using e-mail or Google chats. Then each student does some research and adds to a collaborative Prezi.
What about creating the Prezi and ask different classes to post pictures of their classroom or their school into a designated section of the presentation?

9.) Collaborative Research with LiveBinder – LiveBinders are a great way to collect resources together. You can include pictures, videos, links to web pages and words you have typed. There are plenty of LiveBinders out there created by teachers to organize resources for other teachers. Why couldn’t students do the same? Two classes or two groups could work together to research any topic you cover in Science or Social Studies and share the information in a collaborative LiveBinder.
How else could we apply this?
Why not let students create a collection of their favorite educational websites? Sometimes students are better at finding those resources than we are, let them collaborate with others and they’ll double their manpower.
How about creating a series of LiveBinders for different books? Each LiveBinder can include resources used for the books, student reviews or reflections and discussion questions created by the students.

10.) Make Graphs with Collaborative Spreadsheets – On many of the homeschool groups that I am a part of people are asking for data collection questions to help students gain access to “data”. We can do the same thing with collaborative spreadsheets – part of Google Docs. Students can ask the question and send it to a few classes who can record their data. Students can then use that data to create graphs for class. The graphs can also be created in the spreadsheet program and shared with those who supplied data.
How else could we apply this?
Why not use this in coordination with other collaborative apps? Students can vote through these spreadsheets on which novel they want to study, which project they want to use or which type of collaborative project they want to participate in.


On the Global Teacher Connect Facebook page, feel free to stop and put a shout out to teachers (or other parents if you are a homeschool teacher) to see who would want to connect for a project like these. You may also post a link to a google doc or a blog post (no paid products please!) about your collaborative project. Let’s work together to build global learners and greater understanding by all.

BYOD Resources – Apps & Websites to Use

Recently, I had an e-mail from a follower asking for suggestions on websites and apps that could be used in a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) classroom.  The teacher’s problem was that all of her students were working on different formats.  She had some of her students on a Mac format – generally iPads, which don’t allow flash, but work great with apps, some of her students on Android tablets and Kindle Fires, which still don’t allow flash and don’t always have access to the same apps as iPads and then some of her students on regular old PC laptops, where they couldn’t get apps at all, but had access to lots of cool Flash based websites. 

My suggestion to her was to get to know the resources out there.  There are a few resources – like Edmodo, LiveBinders and Google Docs that work on all platforms.  These resources are a good for projects where you want all of the students to create a nearly identical product or format – like Online Portfolios or published pieces from a Writing Journal.

 For other resources, it takes time to build up knowledge of which apps and websites work on each different format.  I suggest using Google Docs or a page on your class blog of to collect a list of great overall resources based on the three different formats.  As you, your students and their parents find new websites or apps to meet the skills and content you are working on, add these links to this document that so that is available to entire class.  In the spirit of collaboration, I have started my own collaborative Google Document with some of this information.  Feel free to add to this document and/or share it with your students and co-workers.

For example, if you want students to use their device to work on math facts, you might want to use Flash to Pass on iPads, Timed Math Pro for Android devices and Mathmagician on laptops.  All of these help students work on the same skill, in a similar format, but each works on a different type of device.  If you want students to work on creating a video, iPad users could use Explain Everything, Android users could use Animation Desk, and PC users could use Powtoon.

Also, try to choose activities that already have differentiated technology built in – like my Internet Scavenger Hunts, which have Type On Versions, perfect for students who have a PC with Microsoft Word, Clickable Link PDF Versions, perfect for students with Androids, like the Kindle Fire, or PCs, that are not equipped with Microsoft Word or the ability to scan QR Codes and a QR Code Version for your iPad users who can easily download a QR Code App, but often have difficulty opening PDFs.

Do you have a technology in the classroom question that you’d like answered?  E-mail me at hlraki (at) hotmail (dot) com and I will be happy to help you out!

 

 

Using Google Docs to Aid in Collaboration

This year I am the luckiest teacher in the world. I get to teach at the best school ever – International School of Morocco, with some of the best, most creative, teachers ever. Each time I walk into someone else’s classroom, I get inspired and we just seem to spiral great teaching ideas off of each other. It’s a wonderful place to teach, and since we are all collaborating, it’s a wonderful place for our kids to learn – a teacher’s dream, right? I have tried and tried to convince the other teachers to create blogs of their own to spotlight and share some of their amazing ideas, but everyone is super busy. Instead, they have each agreed to let me spotlight some of their ideas right here on Raki’s Rad Resources. So, each Friday night, I will be posting an ISM Spotlight.

We are very busy at ISM right now, due to the fact that October is Heritage Month and tomorrow is our large, International Festival – World Fest.  All of the proceeds of our World Fest go to the charity Amis des Ecoles, which helps support schools in rural areas of Morocco.

So, today’s ISM Spotlight is a quickie.  At the International School of Morocco, there is a ton of collaboration going on every day.  Here is one small way that we are collaborating:

Those of us who teach math use videos, songs, games and apps both in and out of the classroom.  We share these resources with our parents to use at home, and assign them as homework.  In order to keep track of our resources, we have created a Google Document that we all have permission to edit.  As we find resources, we add them to the Google Document, so we keep a running list of what we have found.  This allows us to come back and use these resources again and again – plus they will be easy to find again next year! 

We’ve also shared this Google Document with our parents, so that they also have an easy way to come back to resources we have used and review them with their children.  Parents cannot edit the Google Document, but they can view and use all of the resources that are there.

One other thing that we add to our Google Document is the tutorial videos that our student create.  This way, the students can watch each other’s videos as well, allowing them to teach each other.

Feel free to peruse the Google Document, as you may just find something that would work in your classroom!

Come back next week to see what else we are up to at the International School of Morocco.

Summer Homework on Google Maps

It’s time for the Wednesday Website suggestion!! For two years, I was the Technology Specialist at a school in Georgia. During that time, I amassed a large collection of websites that I use with my students. You can download my E-Book of Websites for the Elementary Classroom for free from Teachers Pay Teachers or Smashwords, or, you can check back here each week for the Wednesday Website suggestion.

View Travel Map - Raki Family in a larger map

 I use Google apps for lots of things, but I’ve never really played with Google Maps until recently.  I made a map with my 8 year old son, charting out all of the places we have traveled (see above).  This summer, we will be traveling around the US and he can’t wait to see where we can add “pins”.  This got me thinking that it would be a great summer homework project.  Have families create a Google Map with at least one pin a week indicating where they have been.  (For students who stay close to home, the pins could be as simple as the supermarket or the library.)  It would go great with the summer scavenger hunt that I usually send home.  (Download the summer scavenger hunt free from Google Docs.)

My students are studying Ancient Rome and we will be creating a Google Map of places where you can find evidence of the Roman Empire.  Here is how easy it is to create a Google Map:

1.)  Go to Google and click on Maps.  (Be sure to be logged in to your Gmail or Google Drive account.)

2.)  Click on My Maps.

3.)  Click on Create a Map.

4.)  Use the tools to drop “pins” or other symbols on to the places you want to talk about – add specific details and information.

Once created, maps can be shared, edited, and even embedded in blog posts.  Maps can be global or city, state, country specific, depending on your needs – simply zoom in and out.

Here are some possible educational purposes of Google Maps:

- Chart out an important event in history (wars, migrations etc.)

- Chart out the important places in a person’s life (historical figure, book character, author etc.)

- Chart out where fossils of a given animal have been found, or where current populations of an animal live.

- Create a year long map that charts the setting of all of the books you read.

- Create a year long map that charts each time you talk about a specific place (in books, Social Studies, Science etc.)

- Chart and figure out distances between specific distances.

What are some ways you can use Google Maps in your classroom?