Snap on it!

My new technology pleasure has to be Snapguide. It is a site I wish I would have had when I was creating screenshot directions for my students because I was tired of repeating directions 100 times after I showed them on the projector and asked them to read and repeat what I was saying as I was showing it. So I started to take step by step screenshots and put them together for the students to watch if they had a question. One of the best teacher funnies that explains this is -

Snapguide is probably the easiest program I have found to help use pictures to give instructions. It allows you to take screenshots and put them together for a guide. Then you can embed the guide into your website and when the 14th kid comes up and asks you how to do something for the 5th time you can direct them to the Snapguide. I created this Snapguide about how to add a tile to a Symbaloo Webmix and how to share the Webmix on your website or blog as I love Symbaloo for saving websites to use later. Here is the guide - 

Check out How to Add a Tile to Symbaloo and Share Webmix by Melissa Kane on Snapguide.

I also find Snapguide to be great with my elementary RTI groups because I can snap pictures of what we are doing and put them together in a Snapguide for them to read and follow the directions with pictures. I started by just typing out the directions in a Google Doc, but felt is was lacking something as we read and followed the directions together. With the Snapguide we have the pictures and the project sort of comes to life as we create it. Here is a Snapguide I created about making Burger Cookies after we finished talking about how 2014 is the year of the family farm and it is important to know where your food comes from. It was a lot of fun - as you can tell by the last picture in the guide. 

Check out How to Make a Burger Cookie With Kids by Melissa Kane on Snapguide.

I think for next year I will put together a Snapguide of my classroom rules so we can go over them on the screen as we put them up on the wall to remember them. I will then be able to put the guide on my website and it will be there to refer to if we need to as well. 

Before you close the 'page' - Please share any tips you use with your students to make sure they remember the directions of the classroom or a project. 

Link things with Thing Link

I came across this awesome Web 2.0 tool that I have to share - Thinglink is what I would call a visual learners dream come true.

Thinglink allows you to take an image and link other information to it. You can use the search box inside of Thinglink to find YouTube or Vimeo clips, SoundCloud or Spotify audio clips, Amazon books, items for sale on Etsy or Ebay, public photos on Flickr or Instagram and Social media like Facebook or Twitter and much more. Click here to see a Slide Share to explain more.  If you know of a great website you can click anywhere on the picture and link it. You can even just include some interesting information in a text box to share.

I can see endless possibilities of how to use this with students. The first thing that came to mind was when I used to collaborate with the art teacher and the students created a report to share information about their environmental issue they airbrushed or artist the interpreted on a birdhouse. With this resource we could take a digital picture of the artwork and students could link information they found on the Internet and even to a Google Doc version of their typed report and tada it is an all digital report to share!

Another idea I had would be for students doing a biography report as we did in 6th grade Language Arts. The students could find a picture of their famous person then link videos of the person giving a speech, an online encyclopedia or magazine article with more information about the person, books about the person, a recipe they like to eat, or even a song they sing or like and a Google Doc of their written report. Another tada for a digital sharing piece!

If you do a million dollar scrapbook in Math you could use a picture collage site like Smilebox,  Photovisi , Fotor, or PiZap to create a collage of all your items then load to Thinglink and create links to online catalogs and websites with prices and descriptions of the items.

I could also see students using it for ecosystem presentations by finding a picture layout of their assigned ecosystem and labeling the different parts with information about why they are important to the life cycle in the system. Or adding videos of animals that live in the ecosystem and websites for environmental websites to protect the area.

Students studying different cultures around the world could find a picture of a celebration in that culture and link to videos or other photos of the celebration, items purchased to celebrate, websites about customs that happen during the celebration, and social media posts from people during the celebration.

Students studying advertising could pick a picture of a product and link to commercials, the products website, information on the history of the product, customer reviews of the product, and stock or price information about the product.

Students reading a book could draw or pose for a picture of the characters in a scene from the book and link to video clips of book trailers (or make their own to link to), other photos that depict happenings in the book, sounds or songs that go with the mood of the book, merchandise the characters might have, or reviews of the book.

Here is an example of the first one I created for a teaching tool to use with the Dewey Decimal System mural in the library.



Before you close the page - share some of your ideas for using Thinglink with your students....