Tuesday Tech Tidbit

For your next presentation project, I encourage you to consider having your students create their very own ebook.  Creating ebooks is very easy on the iPad.  Students use the Pages app to create the book.  E-books can contain all kinds of multimedia, including videos and voice-overs.  The resulting ebooks are easy to share with others.  They open in the Books app on your iPad.  Students feel like accomplished authors, and the results are stunning. Please reach out to me if you would plan an ebook project with your students.  I would love to demonstrate to your students how to create an ebook, and I can lend technical support throughout the project.   This video demonstrates how to create and share an ebook.

With a recent iPad system update (iPadOS 16.2), Apple released a new collaborative whiteboard app called Freeform .  According to Apple: Freeform helps users organize and visually lay out content on a flexible canvas, giving them the ability to see, share, and collaborate all in one place without worrying about layouts or page sizes. Freeform offers an unlimited canvas.  Users can continually add content and never worry about running out of space.  Within a Freeform board, users can add sticky notes, photos, videos, audio, shapes, charts, PDFs, and a wide variety of document types. You can use your iPad's camera to add photos and videos to a board.  Freeform magically appears as an app on all iPads that are updated to system 16.2.  Our school iPads are eligible to receive this update.  Please encourage your students to update their iPads so they can engage with Freeform. If an iPad's storage capacity is too tight to allow for a system update, please view my...

CocoMaterial is a website that offers thousands of copyright-free, hand-drawn illustrations.  If you are looking to place an image into a document or slide, CocoMaterial is a one-stop shop that provides high-quality clipart illustrations that are simple and easy on the eye.  I hate sifting through millions of blurry or overly complicated images in Google when all I want is a simple graphic that looks good on my document or presentation.  If you agree that simple is better, then CocoMaterial is a great place to look for images. You can customize the images in CocoMaterial before downloading them.  You can change the stroke (outline) color, and you can fill the image with a chosen color.  By default the images are black-and-white illustrations with black outlines.   When you download an image, CocoMaterial provides you with a compressed zip file that contains both a PNG file as well as an SVG file.  You will probably never use the SVG file; thes...

I attended the Canva information session at last Friday's PD morning, and my mind was blown!  Dan Niessen from NEONet presented a taste of what can be created in Canva.  The sky is the limit!  Canva is an online platform for creating just about any kind of graphic.  It creates stunning presentations, infographics, videos, whiteboards, websites, and on and on.  If you haven't tried Canva, I highly recommend you check it out.  I love how easy and intuitive it is.  Because our school district has been verified by Canva, staff and students all have free access to all of Canva's premium features. To get started, visit Canva's education website:  https://www.canva.com/education .  If it's your first time using Canva, select the Teachers button and Get verified .  From that point you simply sign in with Google. Canva offers a design school with heaps of amazing tutorials for teachers.  It is very user-friendly.  You'd be impressed b...