Fantastic Student Sessions This Morning

As a technology specialist in a high school, I do not get to interact with the students on a regular basis, so any chance I get to, I jump at it. Last week, I was asked by one of our Digital Design teachers to speak to her students about anything I wanted. I thought about the dozens and dozens of online tools I could share with them. I had 90 minutes per class, which turned out to be a perfect amount of time, although I could show these tools over and over for a week straight. I decided to share with them many of the tools listed here. Here are my reflections from the sessions and the tools I shared:

The students really enjoyed the easy to use interface on picnik. They were easily able to upload images from their student folders and play around with them without having to create register for the site. This was important to me as we did not have much time to play with many tools. The students enjoyed the Effects option on the Create tab the most. Many of them retrieved photos of teachers from our school’s homepage, uploaded them to picnik, then edited them as they saw fit. It was a lot of fun.

flauntR was the second online image editing tool I chose to show them. flauntR does require that the students register for an account, but the registration is extremely easy and does not require email confirmation. The students found the interface a little less-friendly than picnik. They did like many of the features of flauntR, such as the ability to easily create customized wallpaper for their mobile phones in mobilizR. They also enjoyed the PicasR tab, which transforms your image into the same color scheme as some of the most famous paintings in history. That’s a pretty neat little feature. I, personally, like the profilR feature in flauntR. This allows me to easily create profile pictures for my many social networking accounts.

befunky turned out to be the students’ second favorite site we visited this morning. Again, they had the opportunity to upload photos of their favorite, or in some cases not so favorite, teachers, then transform those images into fun, funky cartoon characters. The students were, again, required to register an account, but, as with flauntR, the registration process was simple. I received the most feedback from their ability to use the “cartoonizer” feature. They were then able to add all sorts of crazy things to the new images such as goatees, glasses, bow ties, and hats to name just a few. We spent quite a bit of time of this site because the kids were having so much fun with it. Here is a sample:

We then took a gander at the fantastic comic creation site called Bitstrips. Here the students were able to create comic likenesses of themselves and add themselves into their own self-created comic strips. It was another way to allow them to use their imagination and go wild with it. After a simple registration, they were able to use the “Super Builder” feature, which gave them full control over all aspects of their comics such as background, props, and furniture. They are also able to fully control their characters by changing their characters facial expression, posture, foot, hand and arm placement. Several of the students completed short, simple comics before we had to move on to the next tool, but everyone had a great time with it.

With about 35 minutes left in the block, I introduced the students to, what turned out to be their favorite tool, Animoto. I could see the excitement in their faces as I showed them my sample video I quickly created yesterday. After creating their accounts using the educator code I recently wrote about, they were in and creating videos in no time. Most of the students really put some thought into their videos and created 30 second videos about things that matter to them. They unanimously agreed that creating animoto videos would be much more fun and effective than a regular old power point presentation. I instructed them to push their teachers into letting them use this wonderful tool in ALL of their classes. I also asked them to share, with me, any of their creations. What amazes me is how, in just a 30 second video, a person’s personality comes through. You can really see that in the videos they created. Here are a few of them:

We had a lot of fun today. I hope that these students go to all of their teachers and explain how great these tools are and how badly they would like to use them in their classrooms. They all seemed excited about them today…I hope that excitement continues.

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