What I like about Smilebox isthat you end up with a great professional looking product but kids won’t spend hours choosing their background, clipart animations and transitions as they often do with PowerPoints: that’s already embedded in the design they choose. As a teacher, I would pre-select 2-4 background options and let the students choose one. Then classroom time can be devoted to the actual writing and uploading of pictures or scanned drawings.
Some classroom applications could include:
Postcards: A thank you note to a volunteer or speaker; a “who I am” type of project (some postcard designs let you include over 30 pictures); invitations to an authors’ tea or other special event; recipes; etc.
Slideshows: Any project where you would want one line of text with each slide, all with a cool background and music.
Scrapbook: Any project where you want to display several pictures with each text, such as a class book to summarize a field trip, a science experiment, a state or region project, etc.
Oh, and did I mention it’s free? With the free version you upload your finished product to the Smilebox site and you can embed it into a blog or sent it in an email. You have to have the Club Smilebox subscription ($6/month or $40/year) to print it or burn it to a DVD. In between these two options is a sort of “Pay as you go” where you can pay for one premium design at a time: once you own that design you can also print it or save it as a jpg. There is also a Teacher Toolbox Program which gives many of the premium features for free but they are not currently accepting any new applications…
So here is my Smilebox picture album about our vacation to the North Shore.
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| Make a Smilebox postcard |
You are just a busy little digital immigrant Isa! Smilebox looks great, and I love that the features are controlled :) On a personal note, your kids are going to treasure those yearly trips to Lake Superior! As I mentioned before, my parents took us on a similar trip each summer, and I have such great memories (scouring the shore for agates, stopping at Betty's Pies before it was such a tourist mecca, listening to the waves outside the windows, meandering through all the state parks and rest stops).
ReplyDeleteHow right you are! Last night Christopher was leaning against my shoulder as I was finishing this album, lamenting about how much he missed the North Shore. So this became our bedtime story. I guess I created a piece of digital literature! Yippee! ;)
ReplyDeleteThis is great! I am going to make these instead of ecards. Can these be embedded in emails or PowerPoints? They would be a good way to engage in professional development? I think you are moving from immigrant to native status. Mary
ReplyDeletePS This immigrant can finally post from home on a different browser and it only took me 8 weeks to figure it out. Very humbling.
It was fun experiencing your trip to Lake Superior with you. I especially like the fact that you can add more than one photo to go with each topic. Very cool!
ReplyDeleteGorgeous photos! Thanks for sharing your personal notes about these MN treasures. We visited some of those same sites this summer.
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