Adobe Spark enables you to create a graphic, web page, or video either from a template or from scratch. So I tried my hand at each format, and the results are below.
Graphic Web Page
Video
It was fun playing with Adobe Spark. The interface is clean and simple. I think the students would enjoy using it.
When working on the "glideshow" on the web page, it was easy to import images and Spark automatically created a list of photo credits from the images. I wished that I could see more information about the images as I was selecting them. I found it hard to edit the glideshow. There is no undo button that I could find, so I accidentally deleted my whole presentation one time and had to start over. The video feature was my favorite. I love how easy it is to add narration and royalty free music.
1 Comment
Quizlet and Kahoot are game platforms that I've enjoyed using with my students, so I decided to explore Quizizz because it integrates with Google Classroom, and I wanted to compare it with Kahoot. Tony Vincent thoroughly compares and contrasts Kahoot and Quizizz. Both Kahoot and Quizizz are fun, useful platforms, and I expect to use both of them going forward. Which platform I choose will depend on the intended purpose of the quiz. Up to this point I have used Kahoot to introduce a topic such as the Amazon Rainforest in an engaging way. I use it to activate background knowledge and pique student interest in the subtopics we will be researching. For this reason, I like Kahoot because we play the game briskly as a whole group in a competitive spirit. I tell the students ahead of time that the classroom teacher and I do not expect them to know the answers. If they knew the answers, we would not need to do a research project! Only the scores of the top players show up on the screen. The students really get into the competition with lots of cheering. One down side to Kahoot is that the students are not allowed to create their own Kahoots. However, they can randomly play Kahoots solo as long as the Kahoot is recommended for their age level. In contrast, Quizizz allows students to create quizzes. I plan to use Kahoot for a quick formative assessment after a lesson on tone and mood to see how well the students took in the information. What I like about using Kahoot for formative assessment is I can quickly see how many students answer each question correctly, and stop to discuss any concepts that need reinforcement right then and there while skipping over content that the students got right. It's rather like using plickers. Quizizz seems better suited to individualized assessment. I created a quiz on Tone and Mood to use as a summative assessment. Quizizz makes it a snap to create my own quiz by borrowing and merging my favorite questions from other existing quizzes. Also, the "homework game" feature allows me to quickly link to Google Classroom and create an assignment for my students. One thing that I have learned about online quizzing platforms is that the existing quizzes vary widely in quality and accuracy. I need to read all the questions ahead of time before using a pre-made quiz.
Quizizz is a great discovery! First, I like the fact that students are allowed to create quizzes which is a powerful way for them to learn and review content. Secondly, it is very handy that Quizizz lets me assign quizzes to my students through Google Classroom. Finally, Quizizz allows between 2 and 5 answers compared to Kahoot that always requires 4 answers. This means that Quizizz works for true and false questions but Kahoot does not. Teaching students about plagiarism, creative commons licensing, and how to find, download and cite copyright-friendly images for research projects is an important part of what school librarians do :
Finding good images for student projects is complex not only because the pictures need to be copyright-friendly, but because image sources are not always appropriate for elementary student use. For instance, Pixabay users must be 16+ and Unsplash and Pexels 13+. Our school district flat out blocks some image sources such as Pixabay and Wikimedia Commons. And then there is the step of explaining how to cite the source! How do I address images, copyright and creative commons in my school? First, I sometimes build the students' background knowledge with the following YouTube videos: Next, because students usually go to Google for their images, I demonstrate how Google images can be sorted by license. It seems good for them to know how to do this. However, Google is still not a great source of images for students because often the websites which are the sources of the images on Google (e.g., Pixabay) are blocked, making it impossible to download the image or create a robust attribution. Sometimes we take screenshots of the images from the Google images page and use the link found in the "share" feature for a jury-rigged attribution. I figure it shows a good-faith effort and does point back to the original source. The best source for creative commons license images that I have found is Wikipedia (not Wikimedia Commons since that is blocked). I can tell the students with confidence that the images used there are creative commons licensed and expect that the images will be appropriate for their consumption. Best of all, Wikipedia makes it easy to download an image and attribute the source. When teaching on sources of copyright-friendly images, I usually push out a list in my Google classroom of the following places students can look for images. (FactCite, a subscription database, explicitly grants students permission to use their images for class projects with proper attribution.)
|
AuthorCarol Satta Archives
May 2019
Categories
All
|