First Time Project with Educreations

Once again I see that my students are technology natives and can teach me so much! Last week the students created their Character Trait projects for their guided reading books. I was concerned that they couldn't save in Educreations until they recorded. That meant gathering pictures and photographs of their work in Dropbox or on the camera roll and then bringing them over to Educreations. Many students, however, wanted to use the vast image search within Educreations. One of my students realized that she could go into Educreations, do an entire page with text and images the way she wanted it and then just take a screenshot of that page. The technology specialist, learning center teacher, learning center para, and I never thought of that! We all are too old to be technology natives.

I always reflect on what worked and what didn't. I will still have students plan everything out in a storyboard fashion ahead of time including any hand drawn pictures they want in their presentation. That is why everything else went so smoothly. I will then have them go straight to Educreations to create one page at a time and take a screenshot of each one. That way the work won't get lost. When it is all created then they can record.

Recording was a challenge in the classroom, so I may arrange for some parents to come in next year when we are planning to record. Luckily, this year I had two Learning Center staff members that were able to find quiet areas in the school to do the recordings with a couple students at a time.

One of the students chose to write the text and not record his voice. Instead, he chose a song that fit his character well and recorded it from his Iphone. It came out great! Again, tech. natives!

Our tech. specialist created a school account with Educreations so that the kids could save it to the site. I know there is a way to share these presentations with parents using a link, but I am not sure how yet. I will figure all that out for next year. We did watch all of them in class on the SMARTBoard.