Film Festival Advertisement Category

Last year Canyons School District added a new category to our annual District film festival. For the first time, students were able to partner with local businesses to produce commercial advertisements. Students and businesses had positive experiences, and we all learned a lot from our first attempt. Check out some of last year's winning ads:

 

We are excited to announce that we will again have an advertisement category in this year's film festival. Now is the time for students to consider signing up to participate in the advertisement category for the 5th Annual Canyons District Film Festival!

Why create an ad for the film festival? This is a great opportunity for students to build skills in planning, organization, writing, communication, creativity, and critical thinking. Students learn what it means to commit to completing a project within deadlines where real-world clients are invested. On top of everything, they have the opportunity to have fun while building a creative project and interacting with business leaders in their community.

Teachers, please help us spread the word about this exciting film festival category and encourage your students to participate. Creating an entry for this category would particularly benefit students who are interested film, broadcasting, art, and graphic design. We encourage teachers involved in Consumer Science, Film-making, Student News, Arts/Graphic Design, DECA, FBLA, and Business Marketing to inform your students about this great opportunity.

For more information about the advertising category and all things film festival, visit the Ed Tech Pro Learning website. Keep in mind that although film festival entries are not due until March, students must register for the advertisement category by the first week of December.

CSDDOCS.ORG is Increasing Communication and Helping Going Paperless

Union Middle School’s Counseling office will be using CSD docs this year to track and monitor 4 year planning and goal setting with our 8th grade students, formally known as SEOP.  

Screenshot of master document students will be filling out.

This is crucial because it ensures proper transitioning for our 8th graders to our high school staff.  The high school counselors will be invited to the student’s document and that will ensure that they have instant and current access to student planning.  They can use this in a variety of ways, but particularly it will benefit our student’s future planning and college course access in high school. The amount of memory in the CSDDOCS makes it a much better source than any other system, such as dropbox.  It allows school staff to store student information for multiple years and could even be a significant help in post high school transition as well.

Aside from the benefits of helping students transitioning to high school and making student information available instantly CSDDOCS will help reduce the amount of paper used in our school district.  For example, in prior years Union’s counselors would print 2-3 sheets per student during SEOPs, if you don’t count re-printing for updates or lost papers.  That is nearly two reams of paper saved.  While it may not seem like a lot, it is one example how Google Docs will help to save paper. 

SlideShark

An app I recently became aware of and started using is SlideShark. This is a fantastic app if you are looking for a way to present from your iPad using a PowerPoint. This powerful app has lots of features including presenter view with notes, live slide annotation, broadcast and sharing capability, and a remote option.

Teachers at Butler Middle School just started using this app in conjunction with their iPads and AppleTV. Teachers create a free account online and upload their Powerpoint presentations, or save them in cloud storage (Google Drive, Dropbox, etc). Then, you connect to your AppleTV and iPad via Airplay, and open the app. Your presentations appear in the app ready for use! The teachers at Butler love the mobility and flexibility the app offers

This video walks you through how to use the app and how to upload your PowerPoint Presentations. Best of all...it's free! Check it out!

Instragram for Education

Instagram for Education

Parents love to know what their children are doing in the classroom and what better way to let them know than by showing them?

Instagram is a great way to do just that!  At Sunrise Elementary, Mrs. Lightel created a class Instagram profile.  By adjusting her privacy settings, she is able to post her class photos on a regular basis. Parents can request to follow the private feed to be able to stay up to date with the classroom activities. Mrs. Lightel has the ability to accept or deny any requests, allowing her to keep control of who views the photos at all times.

She posts new pictures frequently and the parents are always excited to see what their students are doing and learning in class.  Instagram gives parents the ability to comment on the pictures Mrs. Lightel posts, in turn making parents to feel like they are a part of the learning environment.  Many parents don't have an opportunity to volunteer in the class, but by posting the photos, the parents can still feel in tune with the class. All in all, it is just a fun way to keep parents engaged in the learning process of their student.

Infuse Learning: BYOD

View this PDF, Infuse-Learning PDF.pdf, for a brief introduction to Infuse Learning

Infuse Learning is a student response system, that allows students to respond in a variety of ways on any device that has active Internet connection.  

The teacher simply creates an account and receives a room number at Infuse Learning.  They share the room ID with their students, who then log in at Infuse Learning.  The teacher is then ready to use the Quick Assessment feature to ask and get response in a variety of ways including Draw Response, True/False, Multiple Choice, Sort and Order, Open Ended, Numeric and Likert Scale.

Other option offered through Infuse Learning is the chance for teachers to create quizzes ahead of time and have students complete quiz at their own pace.  One the home page of your Infuse Learning Account, click on My Quizzes under the Quiz Management Section.  Click the 'plus' sign to create a new quiz choosing response options offered in the quick response section. Once you have created a quiz, you may Edit, Run, Share or Delete the quiz. Running the quiz will make the quiz show up on the device of any student who is logged in.

Pic Collage in the Classroom

Pic Collage is a free app that allows you to import photos from your photo library, Instagram, Facebook and even web image searches.  Pic Collage lets you create collages of your pictures.  You can arrange your photos into frames, add cutouts, filters, borders, stickers and text to your collage.  

Heather Weiler, an extended core teacher at Jordan High School, has been using Pic Collage with her students.  Many of her students can’t write or talk, but are producing great things with this app.  This year Heather’s class had four container gardens.  They grew sunflowers, geraniums, pumpkins, watermelons, and herbs.  Each day, a group would go out and collect data about the garden.  They used scientific instruments such as thermometers and rulers to check sky and soil temperatures and growth of plants. Each student would document their findings in a journal.  Students whose written skills are limited, took pictures and used Pic Collage to describe their journal entry.  Below are pictures of some of the collages/journal entires that were created.

                      

              

Visit Heather’s website, extendedcoreprogram.weebly.com, to see what other great things she is doing with her students.

Haiku Deck for Vocabulary

This app is becoming a real favorite for teacher and student presentations because it is so easy to use. Haiku Deck is similar to what our beloved PowerPoint can do, but faster and more intuitive. Once you begin to type information in, pictures can be suggested for you based on the words you type and presentations are very fast to put together for student presentations. 

There are many programs that do similar things, but Haiku Deck is great for when you need an outline to speak from but not pages and pages of text. This is a more image-based presentation tool. *Great for speeches, outlines and group projects. 

An example of a practical classroom use is found at Albion Middle School where some teachers are using Haiku Deck to make presentations to help students learn subject-specific vocabulary terms. Teachers have been able to create presentations rather quickly with their students in class to include words, definitions and images to aid in faster understanding.