January - Up Your Design Game -

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Quote of the Month - January


We will open the book.  Its pages blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves.  The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Years Day. 
- Edith Lovejoy Pierce


Ꭰօ վօմ Ӏìҟҽ քɾҽէէվ էհìղցʂ?

I am definitely one of those people who look at the beautiful lesson plans for sale on Teacher Pay Teachers and think to myself.  "Why don't my activities look that pretty?  Can't I design something that cool?"  And, "HOW DO THEY DO IT? "  This month we focus on the tools you can use to make beautiful resources for your classroom.  And, a couple of tutorials to show you how!

Ƒɾҽҽ Ꭰҽʂìցղ ͲօօӀʂ

I love the word free.  Especially when it comes to tools that I can use with my students and for my students.  The following list offers a couple of tools that are great for designing resources for your students.  Or, even better, for your students to use!

A few of my favorite things...

Create Graphics (Classroom Banners, posters, worksheets, etc.)

Canva

I LOVE Canva!  It's amazing and has endless templates for designing materials for your class.  And, it's FREE!!  I recently supported a teacher who had students design infograpics using Canva.  The final products came out great and students caught on really quickly to using the platform.  

Google Slides 

Slides are for more than presentations.  I've used slides for magazines, books, posters, infographics, and more.  There are so many possibilities for using slides with your students.  I've linked another Technology Coaches' website for Google Slides.  She provides some awesome tutorials for editing Google Slides.  There is a really cool feature of Google Slides that allows you to edit an entire theme.  This comes in hand when you assign students Google Slides to work on.  It locks elements of the slides in place so they can't edit.  It's awesome.

Google Drawing

Some may argue that Google Drawings is better than Google Slides.  It has similar capabilities to Google Slides but is purposely designed for creating images.  Here's a tutorial to get you started.

Adobe Spark (Now Creative Cloud)

Adobe Spark is very similar to Canva.  There are tons of templates for users to choose from.


Additional Design Elements

I love the concept of "app smashing" - it's when you one app to compliment another.  For example, I would use Remove.bg to place people into different locations in Google Slides.  See example below.  I The following websties are tools that you can use to compliment the list above.



Remove.bg - One of my all time favorite tools.  Use this website to remove the background in pictures.  

UnSplash -  500+ copyright free images.  

Font Generator - Just copy and paste text into your project.  (I used it for this blog post!)

Slides Mania and Slides Carnival - Both of these websites have templates to improve your presentations!  And, each template comes with a set of instructions.  Just click the type of slides you want to use and voila!  Beautiful templates create beautiful presentations.

Get Emoji - This website is just fun.  Use Get Emoji to copy and paste emojis into your project.  



Tutorials: Updates in Google Slides

The new update in Google Slides is amazing.  It provides way more space for editing and sharing with kids.  I would use this update to make interactive assignments in Google Slides!  This video is a great way to get started.


Goo in the Loo - January



Goo in the Loo - December 2021 by Carla Fitzgerald

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