Tag: Pic Collage

Apps, Creative Thinking, Education, K-12, Student Products, Teaching Tools

Word Cloud App Smashing

Terri Eichholz

I think we’ve already established that I have very little imagination.  I admire creativity, but I am much better at borrowing other people’s ideas than I am at generating my own.

When I first learned about Word Clouds, for example, I thought they were fun but really couldn’t think of too many applications for their use.  Fortunately, I network with many other people who can think outside the cloud.

For example, someone tweeted the other day about using Word Clouds with Thinglink.  I wish I remember who.  Great idea!  If you are using iOS, you can use the ABCya Word Cloud app along with the Thinglink app.  On the web, there are plenty of word cloud generators such as Tagxedo and Wordle, and Thinglink has a web application as well.

In April, Tricia Fugelstad blogged about using word clouds with self-portraits.  Since we were using iPads in my class, my students had a bit different workflow than Tricia’s students.  Again, we used the ABCya app.  We also used Green Screen by DoInk.  (Unfortunately, the latter one isn’t free – but well worth every penny!)

wordcloudselfportrait

Last week, Susan Prabulos blogged about using word clouds to reminisce about the year.  I realized her idea would work perfectly with the Pic Collage and/or Canva project I planned for my students. Since we were using iPads, we couldn’t use Tagxedo to create a special shape (great idea, Susan!) but the students enjoyed it anyway.

My 2nd graders were short on time (and somewhat keyboard challenged) so we brainstormed a word cloud to represent our year in GT together.  Then they added it to Pic Collages they created using self-selected pictures from our blog.

Some inserted the word cloud into the layout,

wordcloudpiccollage1

while others chose to use the word cloud as their background image.

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Of course, you could take this activity even farther by creating a Thinglink from the collage and having students reflect on how the photos relate to the words in the cloud.

For more word cloud ideas, check out this post from awhile back.

Apps, Creative Thinking, Critical Thinking, Education, K-12, Math, Student Products, Teaching Tools

More Ideas for Pic Collage

Terri Eichholz

I had a great time at the end of last school year allowing the students to use the Pic Collage app on the iPads to create mini-yearbooks using pictures from our class blog.  There are many uses for the app, and I’m pretty sure that I have yet to use it to its full potential.

Using Pic Collage to summarize your favorite moments from the school year
Using Pic Collage to summarize your favorite moments from the school year

At a recent PD about using apps for creating, one of my colleagues, Camala Rose-Turnage, suggested using the app for a fraction study. Students could take a group of pictures, of which only some have a certain thing in common (such as the color red), and then other students could figure out the fraction.  Awesome!  Besides the fact that I had never heard an idea like this before, I could see a lot of potential for differentiation.  Some students might choose obvious traits for their groups, such as color or shape; others might select something more abstract, such as objects that are used for particular activities (recess toys) or ones that all start with a certain letter.  The fractions might vary in complexity, too.  You could have some students portray fractions that could be reduced, or even – depending on the Pic Collage layout – mixed numbers.

Speaking of math, here is a post showing how students can use Pic Collage to create their own math reviews.  And here are some other ideas that could be used in a primary classroom.

Pic Collage is also great for app-smashing.  Use it with Thinglink and Aurasma for an awesome interactive poster.  You can find a ton of Pic Collage app-smashes on this Pinterest board by Holly Inniger.

What’s your favorite way to use this versatile app?

Apps, Creative Thinking, Education, K-12, Student Products

Using Pic Collage as a Mini Yearbook

Terri Eichholz

Pic Collage

I have 2 blogs that I try to post to each day – this one and a class blog.  My goal for this year was to have the students take over the class blog posts, but that was only partially successful and will be part of my Epic Fails for the Year series in the near future. Part 2 of that particular Epic Fail was getting people to actually read the class blog.  As far as I can tell, only a sprinkling of parents read the posts.  But a few did seem to appreciate them so I trudged on.

I included a lot of pictures throughout the year on the class blog.  The students rarely looked at them, but were excited when I would take a moment to show them in class.  Since I only see most of my GT classes once a week, I must admit that part of my motivation for keeping this up was selfish; the posts and the pics have been helpful to me just to jog my memory every time I do lesson plans 😉

Yesterday was my last class with my 2nd grade GT students.  I like them to do some sort of reflection at the end of the year, and we usually spend a lot of time reviewing the events of the past 9 months. (Otherwise, their favorite memory tends to be the very last thing we did.) This year, I decided to try something different.

I showed the students how to access the categories of our class blog so they could view all of the posts for 2nd grade for this year.  Then they went through the posts, and chose pictures that were meaningful to them.  As they were on iPads, I taught them how to hold their finger on an image to save it to the Camera Roll (fair warning – this is a tricky skill for 2nd graders).  After about 30 minutes, I showed them the Pic Collage app.  They were allowed to add any pictures that they wanted to their collages.  Many added text (and stickers, of course!)  They loved the activity.  When they were finished, each student had a personal poster to remind him or her of the year in GT.  If we had more time, we would have made ThingLinks with reflections, similar to last year.

Of course, you can do this activity without iPads.  Canva is a cross-platform online tool that is great for collecting pictures, and there are many others.  My favorite part was giving the students the opportunity to choose what had been the most meaningful moments to them during the year – and a creative way for them to display this.

UPDATE: Here are some other ways to use Pic Collage from Richard Byrne at Free Tech 4 Teachers.

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