Buncee Ideas Lab! Unlock the Power Of Creativity With These Amazing Ideas!

Our friends at Buncee have something new and awesome to share!  It is the Buncee Ideas Lab and it is filled with amazing ideas for educators around the world! 

In the blog post, Buncee Ideas Lab: Unlocking The Power of Creativity Like Never Before, they shared....

Buncee’s blank creation canvas gives classrooms the freedom to let their creativity run wild...but sometimes, they might need a little spark to light their creative fire. Buncee Ideas Lab helps classrooms achieve just that. This will be your ever-growing hub of creative and inspiring ideas for everyone from teachers to students to administrators. Featuring a variety of tips, tutorials, and templates, Ideas Lab has been created to help you and your students discover endless possibilities for innovating learning at your school, every day.

97% of respondents in our latest Buncee survey indicated that Buncee supports the development of 21st-century skills like collaboration, creativity, critical thinking and digital literacy at their schools. With Ideas Lab, we’ll help your school empower student voice, teach 21st-century skills, create an engaged classroom environment, and foster and support a positive school community.

Ideas are searchable across 20 topic areas, and currently, feature 250+ (and counting!) descriptive ways to use Buncee in and beyond the classroom. So, whether you’re interested in learning how to use Buncee to support your project-based and blended learning initiatives; build your school or classroom brand; or even enhance parent engagement; we hope Ideas Lab is your place for ongoing inspiration and template activities to learn how to unlock creativity anytime, anywhere, and for nearly anything.

I am very honored and excited to be one of the Ideas Lab Contributors. 

 So far I have three lessons in the Buncee Ideas Lab including....

 What the Dinosaurs Did, 

 Guess the Mystery State and...

...Digital STEM Gingerbread Houses. 

It is simple to find these and lots of others in the Buncee Ideas Lab using the filters on the left hand side where you can search by topic area, grade level or type in the search box at the top.  When we find one we want to use, all we have to do is click on Create This. 

I love how we can bookmark favorites too.

When you are in your Buncee account, you will find the Ideas Lab in the right hand corner.  

You can get to the Buncee Ideas Lab here too!  

Our 5th Graders Civil Rights Movement Storyboard That Projects

Our 5th graders just finished a very special project. 

While learning about the Civil Rights Movement with their teacher, Lorie Prouty, we collaborated and co-taught a project using Storyboard That as the students retold the story of a Civil Rights figure and the impact they had on the history of our country. 

To kick off the project, we shared this amazing video of Congressman John Lewis speaking at the School Library Journal Summit which I attended two years ago in Washington DC.  It was so inspiring listening to his story as a young man and how he became a great civil rights leader who continues to make an important impact. 

In his speech, Mr. Lewis spoke about the graphic novel series, March, that he wrote with Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell.  We used this for inspiration to introduce the digital tool, Storyboard That, 

which allows users to create amazing storyboards, like graphic novels, using characters, backgrounds, speech bubbles, and a whole bunch of other assets and artifacts, including important primary sources to share their civil rights movements stories too. 

Our 5th graders embraced this project and did a terrific job creating Storyboard That's to tell these stories from history.  

We created a Padlet for them to add all of their Storyboard That projects to so we could have them in one place for when they presented, read each others, and shared them with their families.

You will find their Padlet here.

It sure was inspiring to listen to our 5th graders share their projects.  They were very proud of what they learned, created and shared.  

We were very proud of them too. 

Reading is for Everyone! You Will Find This Graphic Here For Your Community Too!

When I saw this beautiful illustration on the Capstone bags at the TCEA Conference in San Antonio earlier this year, I knew it was going to be a hit within our school and schools around the world.  It is so special how Capstone has brought everyone together to celebrating that Reading is for Everyone!  

This week, they shared a link to this graphic so everyone can also share, print and celebrate this together within libraries, schools and communities....and even at homes. 

You will find this Reading is for Everyone graphic here too.