Tried it Techie Tuesday

I'm on a roll joining some of the link ups that I have only followed for ages. It's such fun.

Today I'm joining Holly at Fourth Grade Flipper and Technology Tailgate:

 In all honesty this first item is something I tried for the first time this school year but not actually this week.

After seeing several book recommendation ideas on blogs or pinterest I decided to do a combination of a few.

a collection of fun ideas shared by others

The students decided on a favorite book they would like to recommend to others. Then they worked on recreating a cover (either their own version of a favorite scene of one of the current cover) with a summary of the book on the back. This could be done either on paper or with a favorite program of ours, Wixie. Wixie is an online subscription version of the popular software Pixie (which is available for the computer or as an iOS app). We LOVE this software because it is able to do so many things yet it is very easy to use. In this case the students took advantage of a few of the capabilities like drawing, adding images, using internal clip art and adding text boxes.

After the main covers were done they could do an audio recording of their recommendation for the book. For the students that used iPads they did the recording in audioboo and then pasted the url into kaywa to create the QR code. For those that had drawn the covers on paper they went to a computer and did the recording in vocaroo since it can save directly as a QR code to be printed out from the computer and glued on the cover. Well actually we copied and pasted the QR code image into a word doc so we could shrink them down - otherwise they came out way too big for the covers.

While they were working I pulled a few students out at a time to pose for a picture. We printed them up and they cut and glued them on to their completed covers.
I really thought the project came out very cute.

As for something techie I tried THIS WEEK it would have to be the new app for ISTE 2013.

It just came out the other day and I have been exploring all through it. I have been look through my planner, adding vendors that I want to visit and attendees that I would like to meet (you know some of my heroes).

Is anybody else heading to ISTE?

Thanks for dropping by and hopefully this gives you a fun technology idea you might want to consider.