Web. 2.0: Canva

Hello again everyone! This blog post is going to be all about the website Canva. Canva is a site that allows you to create graphics like posters, invites, business cards, photo collages -- basically anything and everything! And the best part is that is mostly free to use! Click here to watch a 5 minute tutorial I made to teach you about Canva.

My favorite feature of Canva is the sheer amount of options you have. There are templates that can be used for school projects or for ideas outside of education. It seems like Canva has covered all of it's bases - social media posts, letterheads, magazine covers, certificates, resumes, album covers, and even YouTube video thumbnails. There are numerous fonts and images and backgrounds and templates to chose from. You can create almost anything for free, and even the things that cost money only cost $1. Here is a screenshot showing just some of the many project you can use Canva for:

While it seems like Canva can only be used for social media purposes, it can actually be quite useful in the classroom. Teachers can create letters for parents and presentations to use for their lessons. Students can create dynamic projects. Clubs and teams can create posters to promote events. With so many free options, the imagination has virtually no limitation with Canva. I hope the tutorial was helpful and I hope to see some beautiful projects coming from students using Canva!

Podcasting in Education

Believe it or not, podcasting can be very useful in the classroom. Both students and teachers can benefit from podcasting. Teachers can use existing podcasts to give the students additional information on whatever they are learning at the time and they can create their own podcasts for students to use and listen to at home if they have questions about what they learned that day. Students can create podcasts for projects and they can publish podcasts for people around the world to hear, just like blogs. Podcasting as a project can help those students who get stage fright and might not like to present in front of the class. Podcasting allows the student to work in the comfort of their own home and they have as many attempts as they need.

One useful podcasting tool is Spreaker. I recently had to use Spreaker for an assignment in my Instructional Technology course and it was an eye-opening experience. I thought that in order to have a podcast, you have to have a nice microphone and great editing software. Spreaker makes podcasting available to everyone. One great aspect of Spreaker is that anyone can access it, and you can access it through both desktop computers and mobile devices. College professors teaching online courses, like my Instructional Technology course, can have their students submit assignments and projects through Spreaker. Another benefit of Spreaker is that it is very user friendly. A technology novice can work Spreaker's DJ board with ease. Everything about Spreaker is self-explanatory, so you log in and instantly know what you're doing.

I was able to use iTunes to find a podcast that was interesting to me. (I already had iTunes downloaded on to my computer, but if you don't and you want it, you can download it for free here.) I went into the iTunes store and was able to find the "Educational Podcast" section. However, the only podcasts I could find that included English were ones that were helping people learn English as a second language. That's not what I wanted. I typed into the search bar "English literature podcasts." That is where I found the Grammar Girl podcast. It was exactly what I was looking for! After picking out what episode I wanted to hear and listening to it, I logged into my Spreaker account to make a short podcast about it. After logging in to my account, I clicked on the "Create" tab, and selected the "Web-Based Console" option. That took me to the DJ board, where I was able to record my podcast episode. I was able to add music and sound effects for free. I could also have added my own music or sound effects if I wanted to. After recording the episode, I was able to publish it, add tags so that I would be easier to find, add a description of the podcast, and share it on different social media platforms.

Here is my podcast that I made using Spreaker. It is a brief summary of the episode of Grammar Girl that I listened to. I hope you enjoy it! I know I enjoyed making it!


Listen to "iTunes Summary" on Spreaker.

Blogging in Education

Technology is becoming a bigger and bigger part of our society as time passes. Children are given iPads as infants and toddlers, laptops and computers are readily available for students of all ages to use, and iPhones are often given as birthday presents to kids in middle school and sometimes even younger. Technology is taking over the world, and education is not immune to that movement. Technology can be incredibly beneficial to students, parents of students, and teachers in many ways.

Blogging helps teachers by not only connecting them to parents, but by tracking their progress in class. Not only can parents see what is happening in class, teachers can also go back and see what happened in the past. Progress tracking is important to teachers. They can see how projects have done in the past years and try them again in the years to come. They can also look back on earlier in the same year and see how much the students have improved since the beginning of the year.

Additionally, students can benefit greatly from blogging. An article written by Ben Curran of Editorial Projects in Education talks about how blogging can better the writing skills of students. The article mentions that teachers already have students write journals and have fellow students comment on them, but now they can do that online. Furthermore, blogging gives students the chance to express themselves in a unique way. Blogging can help students improve their digital literacy and creativity. They can gain confidence by publishing their works.

Blogging is very advantageous to the classroom as a whole, and I hope that you embrace it as much as I am willing to.

Article: Curran, Ben. "How Blogging Can Improve Student Writing." Education Week Teacher. N.p., 29 Apr. 2016. Web. 22 Feb. 2017.