The best part about that last PD session was the technology focus. For me, I was the technology guru in the group. I love finding new websites to play with, new online project ideas for students, and new ways to make existing lessons more engaging. During the PD, we were shown a resource to A MILLION (okay, not a million... but a lot!) of online resources targeted at different teaching strategies, such as assessment, classroom management, or vocabulary. We had time in the meeting to play around with a few. I was able to go through the lists pretty quickly, since many of them I had used before or at least heard of and had an idea of what they did. I took my time to explore new ones that I had never seen. There were a couple of really good ones that I have added to our class Symbaloo for future projects and assignments. And then there was one that I became obsessed with and spent the night playing with...
It is advertised as being a website to create your own infographics. That was cool enough for me to at least check it out. I find infographics eye catching and interesting, even if they are about something as mundane as the composition of dust, or the statisitics of doing laundry. They are just pretty, and have cool layouts, and all these fun facts...
If I could somehow combine that engagement I feel when looking at them with something in class, it must be a win... but I'm not a graphic designer. I was not born with that artistic gene, so perhaps I was getting into something that I really didn't know anything about... oh well, worth a shot..
I sign up for free, and see that there are templates I can try out either as an infographic (which is a long continuous page, not ideal for printing out), a report (which prints well on A4, which I found out is printer paper... DING DING!), a banner, or a presentation. Honestly I ignored the last two when I looked at report. I picked a pretty template... then realized I'd likely want to print them out in black and white, so a colored background was not condusive... and chose a different template with a light background instead.
The editing layout online is pretty straight forward. You can delete or edit everything from the template. I chose a few details, but deleted almost everything else. You can delete the extra pages too if you don't need them. There is a toolbar on the side with options for graphics, text, background, tools... Seems like everything you need is there.
It was surprisingly easy to work with. They provide lots of guide-lines to help you line everything up in a pretty way. There is a shockingly nice array of fonts to pick from. There are photoframes and textframes you can customize to really personalize things. I had so much fun playing around with the layout, font combinations, and paging through the icons (there is actually a huge variety here -- many of which you can change the colors of, which is a plus).
So why even bother playing with all this? What in the world could that be useful for?
My original thought was to use them as handouts or reference pages. There are a lot of topics that come up at the beginning of the year that students need to remember all year long. I started with those topics -- CER Writing, Metric Conversions, Graphing, Significant Figures...
I started working on my class period websites today, and realized that they would be perfect for making a reference section on the website. After creating them, you can download them as .png or .jpeg files, which make them super easy to embed online. This also meant that future pages could be done with more color if I'm going to post them only online. I'm thinking of making a class rules/procedures one to post online. I could even email it to parents then too, which would be great I think.
All of the ones I have made so far can be found on my TpT store as FREE items! What teacher doesn't love freebies?
I need fuel for my current obsession. What other topics would this be great for?
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