The end of the school year is here or soon to be here which means it’s a great time to reflect on what your students have done this year. Here are five ways that you can create some digital celebrations of the year.
Make a video. Animoto makes it very easy to cobble together a set of pictures and add some music in the background to show off what your students have created throughout the year. Try to use pictures from the fall, winter, and spring to show how much your students have changed. If Animoto is too basic for you try WeVideo or Pixorial to create longer videos that include your voice-over commentary.
Create collages about the year. Pic Collage is a
free service for quickly creating picture collages on your iPad or
Android tablet. The app does not require you to register or connect a
social network profile in order to create a collage. If you do connect a
social network profile to Pic Collage you can pull in pictures from
those accounts. Otherwise you can upload pictures that are stored on
your device or take new pictures using the Pic Collage app. The Pic Collage
user interface is easy to use. Just tap the blank canvas to import
pictures from your device, from a social network profile, or by taking a
new picture. To arrange the images in your collage just touch and drag
them. You can expand or contract the images by pinching on them.
Collaboratively create a slideshow about the year. If you’re working in a school that uses Google Apps for Education create a Google Drive slideshow and have each of your students share one favorite memory of the year on one slide.
Collaboratively create a classroom portfolio. Silk is a free
service for creating webpages organized around a theme or topic. Silk is
intended to be a place where you can share collections of materials as
well as write text directly into your webpages. Your Silk dashboard
provides a place to organize your materials into collections and
sub-collections. Your collections can include documents, videos, images,
charts and graphs, and links to other sites. Take a look at a sample Silk site here. You can create multiple sites within your free Silk
account. Your Silk sites can be public or private. Creating
collections on your Silk site can become a collaborative activity by
inviting others to be editors or administrators on a site.
Invite distant relatives to virtually celebrate with you. As an uncle who lives far away from my nieces I know that I would be thrilled if I was able to virtually attend my niece’s preschool “graduation.” Skype and Google+ make this possible.