(Sholl)iloquy

What is Canva? That was what I asked myself when I was asked to use it for an assignment in grad school about a year ago. Our professor wanted us to make an infographic about something and told us that this resource would be a good one to use.  Canva is a graphic design resource that is available as an app and from its website. I have used both the app and website versions and both run pretty smoothly. I only have the free version which limits what you can do through the app. The upgrade is $12.95 per month. Below are the different features between the versions. There is also Canva Enterprise, but that is primarily for groups of people with 30+ members.  I'm really fine with only having the free version of Canva. I don't think I would use it enough to warrant the Canva for Work version. However, if I ended up using the app a lot I like it enough to consider paying for the upgrade.  One feature that is only in the upgrade is the resizing of designs. I...

Experience with Padlet This week I had decided to review Padlet as a resource. There is a desktop and app version of Padlet. I signed up for the free version, which gives you a limited number of Padlets that you can create and you can only upload files of smaller sizes. You can, of course, upgrade with prices starting at $8.25 a month. To create a Padlet, you can either pick from templates or you can start from scratch. If you start from scratch, you will pick a type of Padlet to create. Below are the options: I wanted to do discussion questions on the U.S. Constitution so I picked the Canvas format, although Backchannel would have worked as well. This is what my Padlet looked like when I was finished: This would be the view as both the creator or someone who is just contributing. To add a comment, you click on the pink + button at the bottom right hand corner. You can the connect the comments with an arrow. One thing that I liked about this app is there are a variety of...

About the Video I was thinking about what kind of activity that a short video could be useful for. (Hint: There are many.) I'm thinking that in my classroom I could do an activity called Four Facts. The topics would vary, but I would have my students create a video that shared four facts about a certain topic. For my example, I chose the city of New Orleans. On this example, I chose pretty broad facts: Location, Elevation, Brief History, and Culture. However, this four facts format can really be switched up. You could do four little known facts, important facts, facts I didn't know... There are just a lot of options.  Using Adobe Spark This was my first time using Spark. I created my video using their app because I was traveling this week and it was pretty convenient to use. To get started I was prompted to either start from scratch or use a template. I chose to start from scratch because I didn't see any templates that fit my purpose well. I started building...