4 Ways to Finish the School Year with Creativity

Oftentimes I get requests for creative projects during the last couple months of school. Usually it is because assessments are over and teachers are feeling a bit freer with their time. Whatever the case, here are 4 platforms that support creative projects. 

Use Flip.com for posting questions, collecting thoughtful video responses, and giving everyone a voice. Flip, known as Flipgrid in the past, now has an AI assistant built in to help you come up with topic ideas. It is called “Topic Copilot”. Once you log in with your Google account and create a group, you can click the + button and click on Topic Copilot. Insert a few key words like “historical speeches by presidents of the United States” and it will generate several ideas to post. From there you can tweak it and make it work for your desired outcomes. Another feature of  Flip is its immersive reader tool. This tool will read text to struggling readers. For example, if you load a text to go along with your video it will read the prompt aloud to your students. Because Microsoft now owns Flip it has all the fancy features you might expect from Microsoft. 

Use Garageband for audio recordings with students. Have students record audio clips for things like book talks, science project results, opinions on historical events, or investigative reporting ideas. All of our students have access to Garageband on their laptops and the sets of ipads throughout the middle school. The best audio clips are between two and three minutes. It truly could not be easier to create and share these recordings. One of the easiest ways to share the clips is to post them to a Padlet. Our students love recording themselves. If you’d like support with Garageband or need a rubric for these projects please contact me!

Get into coding simple projects using Scratch.mit.edu. Scratch uses basic block coding. Students could create a digital story, teach a concept or create an interactive game. In the past, students have used Scratch to replicate a cell and label its parts. They have also created simple mazes for other students to play. There is no limit to what they can create with this platform. All of our students have used Scratch starting in 4th grade. It would be super easy to use in your classroom. You do not have to be an expert with Scratch to bring it to your students. I am happy you get started if you decide to use this platform.

Have your students use Thinglink.com and Canva.com together to make their thinking more visual.  Have you ever shopped online at IKEA and seen the little “hotspots” you click on for more information? That is what Thinglink does for digital content. Now, Canva is built into Thinglink as a design tool. Here is how I have used it for creating interactive content. I go to Thinglink and create an account and from there use the built in Canva tool to create the first layer of information. Then I save it to Thinglink and add in the hot buttons to add more information over the images or text on the Canva poster. This is a great way to get a lot of content on one page that looks amazing. Here is an example. 

This is the perfect time to try out a new technology platform without any stress. If any of these ideas spark some interest in you do not hesitate to reach out and we will make it happen together. Happy creating!