I know that I have told you all about the awesomeness of Canva before but this year, it will be even easier for you to use as our whole district, staff and students, have been signed up for accounts. Woo hoo! Canva is a great, easy program to use to help you and your students create amazing info graphics, videos, presentations and more. You can collaborate and share just like you can in Office 365 and there are thousands of visually engaging templates that you can edit to make your own.
Some Features:
- Your education account gives you free access to all the graphics
- Talking Presentations – you can turn your presentations into a video with you in the corner
- Comic Strips – assign your students comic strips in Canva to show their learning. They can even make multimedia comics with animations and music
- Storyboards- have students use the storyboard templates to plan ahead or share learning
- Video projects -you and your students can create easy video projects with templates to help you get started, and photos and video clips that you can add
Resources in Canva:
- Design School – Start here to watch videos or take courses to teach you the skills you need to start using Canva. You can even direct your students here for support for students.
- Educator Resources
I hope everyone’s fall is off to a great start. I am super excited about this year and am looking forward to bringing some of our fun district events back like the Code Quest Arcade in May and the Minecraft Challenge which will come out soon. One great new resource that has come to our district is Live It Earth! Live It is a Canadian resource which is available in English or in French and contains full lesson packages for Science/STEM lessons that closely follow our curricular Big Ideas. The subjects include such engaging topics as Life on Mars, Narwhals, Dinosaurs, Climate Change and much more with a new one coming out every month. Each package contains:
- A Slideshow that you can edit or change that is also narrated if you would like to give your voice a break
- An Inquiry Guide full of working documents that you can modify for students to fill out as you progress through the unit.
- Creative and STEM Challenges with lots of choices and step-by-step instructions
- A Feature Show about the topic which also includes the Indigenous perspective
- Career Pathways
- Self Assessment opportunities
- Post Viewing Challenges and Resources like Game Challenges, Call to Action, Deep Dives and more
Welcome back everyone! I hope everyone has had a wonderful summer and you are all recharged and ready to inspire young minds. Today I am excited to share some of the changes that Microsoft made over the summer. Our class Teams now have a Homepage and Flipgrid, a favourite for many teachers, is now called Flip. Please read on for more information about these changes and don’t hesitate to email me if you have any questions or if you would like support with information technology for you and your class.
Teams Homepage:
Our class Teams now have a new Home Page that makes your Team more like a class webpage. On your page you can have resource links, videos, a list of assignments (that is linked to the assignments feature) and you will get analytics about the number of people that visit your team. Click on Edit in the top right of your Home page to get started. If you would like to learn more about how is all works, please click here to visit an instruction page or watch this seven minute video:
Flipgrid is now Flip:
Flip (formerly Flipgrid )is a super fun way for students to answer questions, introduce themselves, share information and more. Kids love making videos and Flip is a very engaging video discussion app in which students create short videos that can be shared with your class. If you are interested, click here to get started. You can sign in with your Microsoft account (your regular work email) to make it easy. Please make sure to send home a district app consent form to make sure your parents know you are using it.