MACUL sessions: Ideas for Creative Projects

The first session I went to at the MACUL conference on Friday was the most interesting and most inspiring for me in terms of how to use different tech tools in the classroom to assess students. The session was called Ideas for Creative Projects and the presenter was Justin Cowen (@jepc71). Justin spent about an hour presenting various tech tools that either students or teachers can use to make learning more interactive and engaging. His forum for the presentation was a Trello board which was an interactive board which allows both the presenter and the viewers to click on various links to take them to different places on the internet, documents, etc. A link to the Trello Board that he used is here: https://trello.com/b/rlglE0sZ/macul-2015-ideas-for-creative-projects. This link will take you to the Trello Board he used and allow you to access the tech tools that were featured in his presentation. Among those were Peardeck, Easl.ly, Canva, Thinglink, Soundcloud, Adobe Voice, Autocrat, readwritethink.org, and chromville. I will discuss Canva a little bit further because I think it is something that all of us MACers could use tomorrow if we had access to computers in our placement.

Canva is a program that allows students to demonstrate their understanding of a concept using a variety of different visual mediums such as a poster, business card, and presentation among others. Students can create infographics using a variety of different options in terms of text, photos, layouts, and backgrounds. There is an option to upload photos to use as backgrounds or just to bring an added element to the infographic. Here is an example of the poster Justin created as an example of a project students could do: Earth Day. This is just one example of how students can use a simple program to create posters that demonstrate their understanding of topics. Easel.ly is a very similar program but allows students to create more extensive infographics. With the right amount of instruction, it could be a valuable tool in classrooms.

Overall I found the MACUL conference to be very helpful and very interesting. I found it valuable to hear a variety of perspectives on technology and classroom experience and the many different presentations I heard were often inspiring. It was refreshing to see that there are hundreds of teachers in the state of Michigan who took time out of their busy schedules in the classroom to attend this conference and dedicate themselves to becoming better educators. As a quick side note, the names of the tools from Justin Cowen's presentation are also posted in the Google Doc that Jeff created. I hope that you all find them useful and helpful!