Slides from Vermont Fest

I was at the Vermont Fest ed tech conference last week.  Here are some themes that I took away from it:

• A big emphasis on creativity, both high- and low-tech.
• Personalization
• A need to rethink how we do professional development in schools
• A real movement towards getting more computer science and coding in the curriculum.  Speaking of which...I hope you saw my last post about Hour of Code.

I also wanted to share the slides from my own presentation about using screencasting.  Thank you to Amy Wardwell, Olaf Verdonk, and Nicole Gorman for their contributions. Note that some of the examples may not play because they are not publically shared.

Oh, and here's a nice site I learned about (from watching a keynote speaker use it)-- https://www.flaticon.com/.  Lots of free icons to use in your presentations (attribution required if you have a free account).  I'm a big fan of icons over realistic photos when you want to present a general image over a specific one.

For example, consider this image of a student (from Pixabay.com)

versus this one

Icon made by Smashicons from www.flaticon.com

They're both compelling, but the icon perhaps better represents "all thinkers."

Making charts in Canva

Canva is a great tool for generating graphics-- everything from logos to posters to infographics.   I was just using it today and noticed the new Charts feature.  What's great about it is that you can edit the data (unlike some graphics app, where a chart is really just an image of a chart).

Here's a screenshot of a bar chart creation:

Give it a try!  As always, I'm happy to help.

Adobe Spark Accounts

Interested in using Adobe Spark with your students? 

To get the premium features, your students will need to have accounts created.  Because account creation generates an email, it's best to have this done moments before you introduce Spark for the first time.

Here's the process:

1. A few days before introducing Spark, let me (Charlie) know, so I can get the accounts ready. 
2. When you are ready to begin, I will activate the accounts, triggering an email to the students.
3. Begin getting creative with Spark!

Printing a Piktochart

I've written before about Piktochart. It's a great web tool for creating infographics as well as other

documents.  These work great on the web, but sometimes people want a printed version. Piktochart does not have a built-in print feature (a la File..Print).  I've put together a document that explains how to get around that.  Essentially, it involves sizing your Piktochart correctly and downloading it as an image.

Here are the details.

Report on Media Use

The average teen uses 9 hours of media a day.

Common Sense Media (an excellent resource for issues around kids' media use and digital citizenship) just released a study on how students aged 8-18 use media.  The results are summarized in the infographic below.  Worth reading.  The full report is available here.

Using PiktoChart in presentation mode

Do you use PiktoChart?  I've posted about this great tool for creating infographics.  Recently, I learned something new about PiktoChart from a student...

Groups were presenting in my computer programming class.  Most used Google presentations or Prezis, but one group surprised me by using PiktoChart.  It turns out that there is a now a "Presentation Mode" that shows one block of the infographic at a time in a nice, clean interface.  It worked great for the presentation they were doing.

You can try it here (click on Presentation Mode on the upper right):

Here's how to use Presentation Mode in PiktoChart. 

Infographics

In an earlier post, I mentioned students creating infographics.  In case that's an unfamiliar term, or you're not sure what students might do with infographics, here are some wonderful examples from Stan & Emily's sophomores.  They were charged with creating infographics about the impact of cotton on the early US.  Caitlin's is shown below and here are some more.