The Gift of Digital Voice
Technology is ever-present in schools today, but to what end? School leaders’ inspiration for this use varies from school to school. For some, technology use is driven by a desire to prepare students for online test-taking, for others, it is all about job readiness, and still others argue that it is also about engaging students growing up in a digital world.
However, the technological gift that I wish for every student at is to find a platform for giving voice to their passions and to feel that their voice is heard. When we give students the power to be creators, we give them confidence; we give students their digital voice and a source of internal strength to use it.
Here are a few options if you would like to give your students the opportunity to create.
- It is as simple as it gets: click record, click the same button to stop and then download an mp3 that can be uploaded to Google Drive.
- Simple to use video slideshow creator
- For a video overview of Powtoon, click here
- Wevideo is a built-in Chromebook video editor
- Here is a good video overview of WeVideo
- Scratch is a graphical computer programming platform
- It is easy to start using, but can get very sophisticated as you learn more.
- Glogster is a great tool for making a digital poster with embedded images, videos, text, links etc.
- Here is a video overview of Glogster.
- All the sharing power of Google Drive in an easy to use drawing program
- Word clouds are groups of words generated from a text that give more prominence (size, color) to words that appear more often.
- You can watch an overview video of Wordle here.
- Piktochart is an easy to use program for creating infographic pages
- Includes a mixture of formatted text, flat design images, graphs etc.