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.

TESOL Teaching Tip #54 - Alternatives to Presenting in Front of the Class

As a teacher at an International School, many of my students were English Language Learners. Even my native English speakers were living in a non-English speaking country. Due to my unique teaching position, I have had some readers ask for tips on teaching English Language Learners. Here is this week’s Tuesday TESOL Teaching Tip:

TESOL Teaching Tip #54 - Give students alternatives to presenting in front of the class.
Imagine standing in front of a room of people who speak perfect Mandarin Chinese and speaking in the broken Mandarin you had been learning for about a year, giving a speech in Mandarin on which you would be graded.  Your palms sweat, your heart races and all the words you do know in Mandarin go racing out of your head from the adrenalin of the moment.  You open your mouth to speak and the words that do come out, jumble up as you try to hurry up and be done with it. 
This is the experience our ESL or ELL students experience when we ask them to present a project or research paper to the class.  The resulting presentations rarely reflect the students’ true language ability or knowledge on the subject.  However, we tend to give them a grade on the presentation just the same.
As a teacher who has always used as many project-based learning experiences as I can, I believe in presenting the completed project.  By presenting the project, students learn to work for an audience, take more pride in their work and are more motivated to create quality work.  I have included presentations as a part of all of the projects before:
   

    

          
However, I don’t think that the only way to present projects is by standing in front of the class shaking while your classmates watch on – often bored and not paying attention.  Instead of standing in front of class presenting, I often use one of these alternative techniques:


1.)  Museum Day:  Each student sets up their materials in a display around the room and stays at their display to present.  Invite in another class (or two) and ask them to wander around the materials, with no more than 2 or 3 people stopping at each display at one time.  When they get to a display, the person who created the project will present to the few people who stop.  Museum guests can wander at will, or can change displays at the ring of a bell.  Either way, museum presenters will present their project multiple times, giving students a chance to explain their project and use their language skills multiple times in one lesson, while providing them with a low stress way to present.

2.)  Pair and Share:  Split your class into pairs.  In each pair, students will take turns presenting their project to their partner.  Students get the one on one experience of teaching and learning, including the option of asking detailed questions.  You may choose to have students break into a different set of pairs and repeat the process.  In fact you could do as many pairings as you have time for.



3.)  Parent Presentations:  Set up your room similar to the set up for museum day, but invite adults to come and visit – parents, administrators, teachers with a prep period.  When parents come in, students have a chance to present to their own parent in their home language, and then turn and present to an administrator or teacher in English, giving them even more practice with their language skills.



4.)  Small Group Presentations:  If it is very important that all the kids in your class hear all of the presentations, then try doing small group rotations. Break your class into 4 groups.  Have one group stay stable while the other 3 groups move around and listen to presentations from the group who stable.  Once everyone has seen these presentations, switch and make another group stable.  Continue until all students who listened to all presentations.  Management tip -If you are going to have students listen to all presentations, you may want to have them use a graphic organizer to keep track of what they learned from each presentation and keep them engaged.

If students do need to present to the entire class, I often give them the options to work with a partner or group (strength in numbers!) or to create a video and play the video for the class.  All of these strategies are also helpful to students who have stage fright or anxiety about standing in front of a large group of people.