Our 1st Graders Created Animations Of Their Personal Narratives With Adobe Express!

 

This year we are so excited to add Adobe Express to our school. It's such an amazing and important addition to our toolbox of content creation tools we use with all of our students in preschool through 12th grade. 

I have been visiting classrooms since the beginning of the year as we get our students up and running with Adobe Express.  We have done several projects and last week, I collaborated with the 1st grade teachers and we brought it to some of our youngest students. 

For their first Adobe Express project, we tied it into personal narratives they wrote. 

From the moment they logged into Adobe Express, they were excited about all of the choices they saw on the new platform.  

In Adobe Express, students can create presentations, infographics, documents, videos, webpages, graphs, and so much more.  

One of my favorite is Animate Your Voice.  Students will animate the character with their own voice.

It's a perfect fit for the personal narratives they wrote. 

In  Animate Your Voice, they choose the character and background, and then record their voice.  It magically then animates the character with their voice, and brings it to life. 

In Animate Your Voice, students choose from dozens of different types of characters and...

...backgrounds.  They can even upload their own background personally their video even more. 

The size of the character can be changed, and creators can also choose from different types of sizes for where and how it will be shared. 

After I showed them for a few minutes how to use Adobe Express and this tool, the first graders got right to work.  They were so excited about this project and couldn't wait to animate their voice too. 

When they finished their animation, they downloaded it onto their Chromebook.  

I created a Padlet for all four classes.  This would be the spot where each student would upload their animation. 

I love using Padlet to bring projects like this together. It makes it easy for them to share their creations with classmates and family. 

Here is the Padlet from Mrs. Curran's class.  You will have to check out a few of their special animations.

This was a great first project for our students.  We have done it with other grade levels too this fall.

Next week, I am going back to the 1st grade classrooms for our second Adobe Express project.  This time, they are going to animate a pumpkin after...

....researching pumpkins on our Pumpkin Choice Board using PebbleGo, Capstone Interactive eBooks, ABCya, and more. You can find it here too. 

With this project, we are also going to teach them how to upload their own background, like I did in the example above. They will love personalizing their animation even more. 

You can find out all about Adobe Express here, friends. 

Here's The Pumpkin Choice Board Filled With Reading, Research, Learning and Fun Using Capstone Connect!

             

Our youngest students have been learning about pumpkins this fall.  

Today, the first grade teachers asked me to create a choice board focusing on pumpkins and one that would include research and reading around pumpkins and the life cycle of a pumpkin, plus a few fun places for them to create with pumpkins virtually too. 

I started by going to Capstone Connect and searching Pumpkin. 

The search brought me the PebbleGo article and...

...Capstone Interactive eBooks. I can take a screen shot and grab the link for each resource in Capstone Connect.  

This makes it so quick and easy to pull together the choice boards that I create in Google Slides. 

Once I have everything in the choice board, I am ready to publish the slide to share with students and teachers. 

I go up to File and down to Share and Publish to the web. 

This will give me a link that I can then share with students.  We just add these links to their Google Classroom. 

The Pumpkin Choice Board will give our 1st graders choices as they learn all about pumpkins. 

You will find the link to this choice board here where you can make a copy, add your own links or edit, and publish to share with your students too. 

To learn more about Capstone Connect, visit the site here.

Connecting With Our Students Passions Through Choice Boards, Capstone Interactive eBooks and PebbleGo!

 

This week I had a request from a teacher for a choice board. But not just a choice board for her classroom. This was a choice board for one student who was crazy about space.  

She asked me if I could create a choice board for her first grade friend and fill it with places he could learn about space at school and at home. 

I came back to the library and went right to Capstone Connect, where I searched Space.  

I narrowed my search to eBooks and PebbleGo articles. I found several amazing Capstone Interactive eBooks to add to the choice board I was creating in Google Slides. 

In Capstone Connect, we can copy the link to all resources and take them...

...over to our choice board and link them to the images we have added. 

I also went to PebbleGo Science and searched Space. 

Our students love the Earth and Space Sciences articles found in PebbleGo. 

For this choice board, I added Space Science and Earth and Space Science Jobs. 

The great thing about a choice board is that I can always switch these articles and eBooks up as our friends reads and learns about space. 

When I create choice boards for our students to use, I always make the published link into a QR code using QR Code Monkey so they can access it with whatever device they are using, at school and at home.