Recently I attended the Pinnacle Showcase that our county puts on every year. It is a chance for leaders in technology to show off their stuff and share what they have been doing during the school year with their technology. Now that I don't have to present myself, I love going and seeing what others are doing and take new ideas. This year I took two ideas away, one of which is Padlet which I will try out at the beginning of Units next year. The other I took away was Emaze, which has a Newspaper template that I was UBER excited to try out. In the past I have tried a couple newspaper templates and I must say that this one is by far the best in appearance and its ability to bounce around. So I decided that I would implement it in their final project.
Breakdown of the Assignment:
- 10 slides total
-One slide needed to be dedicated to vocabulary - at least ten vocabulary words
-Last slide needed to be a youtube video (not exceeding 10-15 minutes)
-The other eight slides were to summarize the note pages from the Unit they were assigned
The main complaint by students was that it didn't allow for collaboration, and that was a minor flaw for me; although while one was typing the other could be looking for new information to add so a "divide and conquer" method was applicable since their notes were not on the device. The other main complaint students had in their evaluation was the slowness in logging in. As the whole class was trying to log in at one time, there did seem to be a variety of responses on the website. Some students (those in the room first and logging in first) had no issues, those who took longer to get in, also had a rotating circle while the website tried to load. The longest it took was eight minutes after the bell rang.
My critiques of the web application were the same as my students. The only additional critique is the cost of the app for individual students or having to pay for a classroom rate. The posting of links does not always work in the presentation for some students. It shows they posted something, but when you click to go view it, it simply brings you back to the presentation. My likes were the following:
-The Newspaper Template is the best I've come across thus far
-Moveability feature similar to Prezi makes the presentation more interesting
-Ease of use - top left corner has an add slide with multiple layouts to choose from; moving slides was also easy with just click and drag
-Ease of Sharing - provides embed codes and links with just a click of the button
The benefit is that we now have shortened summaries of our Units that students can use to go study on their own before finals (we are also reviewing them as a class).
Parts of this project were great! But I'm not as "Emazed" with the application as I was hoping... If they allow for collaboration in the future I may be willing to pay.
