hey everybody this is sam kerry from the new tech classroom and in this video
i'm going to give you my top 10 favorite creative projects you can do with students
creative projects are obviously something that you could do at the end of the year
to finish the year off but all the projects i'll show are also projects you could do at
any point of your school year as well one of the most important shifts we can help
students make is to not just be consumers of technology but to also learn how to create
with technology so stick around and i'll show you 10 ways that you can do that
one tip that's going to apply to all the projects and tools that i'm going to show is that you
should give students some time to tinker in each of the programs and play around with the tools
and figure things out for themselves you don't personally need to be an expert with the programs
that you use and you can even be open and honest with students and have them teach you about some
of the different features and even start teaching the rest of the class that might even help you
get more buy-in all right the first project is to have students make a digital comic and my favorite
program for making digital comics is storyboard that you can use digital comics for students to
summarize books using a plot diagram to make timelines for character analysis to show what
they've learned about historical events and more and just so you know storyboard that does offer a
free 14-day trial but after that you would have to pay for a subscription you can use digital comics
as a way to have students practice visualization skills practice writing concise summaries and also
practice writing dialogue if you're going to have students make digital comics before they actually
get into storyboard that i'd recommend having students fill out a template first so you can
give them feedback on the content of their work before they actually get into making their comics
once students are in storyboard that they have options to bring in different characters and
then customize the way those characters look as well as the different poses of the characters
and then they can also do things like bring in different scenes bring in objects and even
import images into their comics so the end result is that every comic students make ends up looking
pretty creative and unique i have a full tutorial about making digital comics with storyboard that
i'll put in the video description and you can also get the template that i showed in the video
description too all right number two is a basic video project and one of my favorite programs
for making beginner video projects with students is canva videos are incredibly easy to make in
canva because they don't require any video editing skills which is why i say that this is
more of a beginner video project instead of using a layering system like more complex video editors
canva just uses different slides that are animated to look like a video
students can add different elements on each slide such as text and images then they can
easily change the animation style and color scheme as well as add background music to their videos in
addition to images students can also import actual video files and then add text on top of those two
so if you were doing a project where students were documenting something like say their science
experiment they could take a video on their phones and then upload it to canva and then upload it to
their video mixing images and videos produces a pretty cool effect that looks something like this
you can get a canva for education account for free and i've put a link to my canva for education
tutorial for teachers in the video description if you want to learn more my third creativity project
is an ebook or digital book with book creator just like basic videos and digital comics you
can use digital books to have students show their understanding across pretty much any grade level
in any subject area with book creator you can access one library and 40 books for free and after
that book creator does cost 10 a month to use if you don't want to pay though you can also archive
your old library to be able to open up a new one book creator has a library of digital books you
can show to your students to help inspire them for their creations when you show these to students
you'll also want to point out that digital books are different from regular print books because
you can embed multimedia in them like video and audio files when you have students make digital
books you'll also want to talk with them about the importance of presentation as a creativity skill
the content of their book might be amazing but if it's poorly presented it's probably going to be
poorly received that's an important life lesson so use this as an opportunity to teach students
about font families and color schemes and if you don't personally know a lot about those topics
then you can go out and find plenty of resources online that you can share with your students
i'd also recommend that you show them all the different multimedia tools and emphasize the
importance of incorporating multimedia into their books since they are digital books after all i'd
even recommend incorporating all the multimedia tools into your project assessment rubric and
you can also get this rubric as well as a digital book planner in the video description my fourth
creativity project is a podcast project and my favorite program for podcasting with students
is soundtrack soundtrack offers a 30-day free trial which should be plenty of time for you
to be able to do a podcast project with your students there's also a promo in the video
description that will give you access to a 90-day trial the key to a successful podcast project is
all about preparation and planning first you'll want students to decide on a topic
and then they can do some additional research to bolster their knowledge and then you can have
them decide whether or not it makes more sense to have them do a monologue or conduct an interview
for both choices you'll want to have students plan out everything ahead of their recordings
and there are some excellent resources out there for this like kqed's how to write a perspective
guide if students are going to be doing interviews you might want to have them get the app version of
soundtrap so that they can actually record those interviews directly on their phones
rather than trying to use the desktop version soundtrap also has a collaboration feature so
students can record together even if they're not physically in the same room once students have
their podcast prepared recording and soundtrack is easy they pretty much just have to hit record
and after they're done soundtrap has some cool features like the ability to transcribe the
audio file and then edit the audio directly in the transcription so if there's a part students want
to remove they can just delete the words and that will delete the actual audio wait soundtrack can
you please make a video editor too and since soundtrack is also a music making platform
students can also add sound effects and musical loops to create a podcast interlude once students
are finished you can download the audio files and upload them somewhere else like a class website
so that the rest of the class and even potentially the rest of the school or others in the community
can listen to the podcast that students created and yes i also have a full tutorial about how
to do a podcast project using soundtrap as well as a full lesson plan template that you can take
and use the fifth idea is to have students make a paper project or a diorama really anything that's
not involving technology and then have them use seesaw to take a video of the project or take
images of the project seesaw is basically a multimedia layering tool so after students
have captured their work you can have them annotate on top of it using the drawing tool
and mark it up to explain what their work shows this works for any type of media so
let's say that a student took a picture of a poster and then wanted to add a video on top
of that picture of their poster explaining what it means they could do that too there's a link in the
video description to a tutorial about seesaw if you want to learn more about how to use it
and by the way if you're getting value out of this video be sure to hit the like button and i'd love
to hear from you in the comments what's your favorite creativity project to do with students
the sixth idea is to have students make a web page project using adobe spark post web page projects
are an ideal way to have students showcase a summary of what they've learned over the
course of the entire year you might also have students design a web page to make an argument
to present information that they've learned or to create a digital newsletter or blog
students don't need to know how to code they can just add elements to their web pages directly
like images text and videos and then they can easily change the theme and colors to create a
more customized look you can see in this example of a web page presentation i made with spark post
how clean and professional it looks even though it didn't take me a ton of time to create
and yes i also have a longer tutorial that i put in the video description about how to do web page
projects with adobe spark post my second idea was to do a beginner video project and the seventh
idea is to do a more advanced video project an ideal tool to use in your classroom to make the
step up to more advanced video editing is wevideo wevideo is web-based so it doesn't require you to
download and install the software and students can use it on chromebooks one of my favorite ways to
use wevideo is to have students make skit projects since students can collaborate together on making
a video in wii video they don't even necessarily have to be together to make a skit they just need
to upload their individual video files to video in addition to uploading their own files they
can also add video clips from the stock library in wii video as well as customizable transitions text
and audio although wevideo is a much more advanced video editor than the one i showed in canva
its layering system is still intuitive and easy to get the hang of another plus for wii video is that
it has a chroma key feature so you can also use it to make green screen videos which will allow
students to swap in different backgrounds and make their skits look more realistic wii video does
offer a free 30-day trial period so that should be enough to get you through a project and see if
you like it and then after that you do have to pay to use wevideo the eighth idea is to have students
make a design project in tinkercad in tinkercad students can create three-dimensional designs so
you can use it for projects like having students design solutions to real-world problems like
say creating their own inventions or you could use it as a modification of a more traditional
model or diorama type project in a makerspace class i currently co-teach students designed a
model community center and also designed objects that would go inside of that community center
and then we printed those objects out with a 3d printer and actually gifted the model community
center to the real community center so that was pretty cool the ninth project is to have students
make digital maps and you might not know this but a program that you can use to make awesome
digital maps is padlet to make a map students will need to sign up for free tablet accounts
and then choose the map board there they'll see that there are some different map styles that
they can choose from once your students have picked a map style they can create new posts
based on specific locations on the map students can either drop pins on the map or they can
search for a specific location that they're looking for as an example if you were doing
a history project where students were tracking important locations along the silk road students
could search for those locations and then write a description about why each place was important
then students can continue to add new pins on their map and in addition to text they
could also bring another picture in as a way to supplement what they're trying to show in the post
once students have created more than one pin they can connect the pins together to show the
relationship between places so here you can envision how student could create an entire
map with all the important locations of the silk road and then string them all together
to indicate the trajectory of the trade route i put a link in the video description for
my how to use padlet for students video if you want to do a project like this and need to show
students how to create accounts and how to use the basic features of popup all right my tenth and
final creative project idea for you in this video is to have students make augmented reality or
virtual reality using co-spaces edu cospaces uses drag and drop coding that's similar to scratch
and on their website you'll find lots of ideas for how you could integrate ar and vr design
into different subject area classes for example you can see on this video that they posted on
their youtube channel some examples of different virtual exhibitions that students designed as
a way to show what they learned about a topic students can also design simulations and test
experiments in co-spaces so it would also be a great choice for a creative digital project to do
in your science class thanks so much for watching this video if you're looking for
full tutorials about most of the programs that i showed in this video then be sure to check
out that playlist above you can also get access to all the graphic organizers and resources that
i referenced in this video and more by signing up for my weekly newsletter and if you want to learn
everything you need to know about how to teach with technology then be sure to check out my
online course the 21st century classroom thanks for watching and i'll see you in the next video