Well this week was a nice change from the previous weeks. I enjoyed checking out these four different apps. I found all of them to be useful and fun to explore overall.
Book Creator: I liked book creator a lot. I found it to be very user friendly...and more importantly kid friendly. I can definitely see myself using this app with my students on our school Ipads. Once the students get used to the ins & outs of how Book Creator works, I can see them putting together books for some of our fourth grade projects. One project that comes to mind is making a scrapbook for our biography reports. I like that my students will be able to easily import photos, images, and videos. It really is a great app for all ages.
Deck Haiku: I thought that Deck Haiku was cool to use, much like Google Slides. The one thing that stuck out with Deck Haiku was nice how professional the presentations look with being able to upload high quality images as a background. I worked on this at home, so I did not run into some images being blocked on my searches but I could see this as a potential issue at school. One thing that I did not love about the 'text' feature is not being able to size the text. As I said before, I think you can make some good looking presentations, but running into potentially blocked images and not being able to size the text makes me hesitant to use this app with my students. I could see them getting frustrated with it.
Notability: This was my first time using Notability, and I will say that I was impressed with this app. It definitely helped to watch the tutorials, and once I did, I felt that the app was pretty much straight forward to use. Some of the features that I liked the most was being able to type the text anywhere on the page, the ability to upload photos, and I really like the voice text feature. I could see me using this app with my students this year, especially with our Great Brain project. It will be a great way for them to collect notes on their topics, and create subtopics as well. Overall this is a terrific app.
Sketchnoting: I found Sketchnoting fun to play around with. This was my first time using this app. I can see true artists falling in love with this app, because there are so many tools to draw with. I'm not a great artist by any means, but I gave it my best efforts to sketch out my 36 Things Learning (my daughters were impressed with my sketch). I really like the the artistic options that this app offers, but I don't really see myself using this app much with my students.
Students at hibbard woods used paper 53 to create book covers for projects that they then imported and used in book creator.
ReplyDeleteI use haiku deck to crest cool images and then bring those pictures into google slides for that fine tuning of text (theresizing you missed with Haiku deck)
That's called app smashing- bringing multiple apps together.
Notability has changed my life, Erik! I love taking notes by hand, and Notability doesn't take that away from me. I'm also so reluctant to let the kids type all their notes because I know the benefits that come from taking notes by hand and I don't want the kids to lost them - this could be a great compromise.
ReplyDeleteI was also frustrated that Deck Haiku wouldn't resize the text and I assumed I had to be doing something wrong.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you about Deck Haiku. The presentations look great but there were a couple frustrating features. There are so many new things to try with our students - it will be hard to choose. Thanks for sharing!
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