Let’s explore two of my favorite edtech tools, Lumio and Canva EDU, and see how they can be combined to create educational magic. I’ll explain what each tool does first.
Canva EDU
Back in 2014, when I first started teaching, I was looking for a poster-creation tool online. A colleague recommended Canva to me. You can do so much here. As I dug deeper into Canva that semester, I discovered it contains a lot of features including social media posts, flyers, and infographics. You can create a free educator account at Canva if you’re a practicing teacher. It’s amazing. Here’s what you can do with Canva for EDU:
- Assignments
- A class with classwork
- Plan out your content
- Find different templates just for teachers
You can create presentations, QR codes, infographics, worksheets, group work, and lesson plans in Canva for EDU. You can also present live using Canva. The possibilities are endless! I encourage you to take a look at the site and see what you and your students can create.
Lumio
Picture it! In 2007, I taught a special-needs class. While walking down the hallway to my classroom, I noticed that the storage closet was open. In the storage closet was a Smartboard. I decided to give it a new home: my classroom. Through classes and training tutorials, I quickly learned how to use it. Every day, my students used the Smartboard to learn about literacy, numeracy, attendance, and fine motor skills. Since then, it has been redesigned into Lumio.
Through interactive slides, games, polls, and questions, Lumio enables you to teach your students. It offers a library full of templates you can customize based on your needs, saving you and your colleagues time! Content can then be searched for based on keywords, grades, or subjects. Standards and resources can then be selected. A wide variety of interactive activities are available. If you want to have all students interact with the material on the interactive whiteboard, you can show the material on the interactive whiteboard.
You can also create the material from scratch with Lumio. Create content with Lumio’s template slides or start from scratch. It’s especially handy how the design work is already done—all you need to do is input the content. You can also click on the magic wand on the slide to make it a handout for students to complete individually or create a collaboration board for the whole class to use. There are so many options to engage your students with before a lesson.
The Dream Team
So, how can I use these two tools together? Well, try taking the beautiful design work in Canva, create a presentation and save it as a PDF, then upload the presentation to Lumio and add the formative and engagement sprinkles to it. What kind of sprinkles, you ask? Here are some fun and engaging features:
- You can add YouTube videos to your lessons.
- Check out Desmos, a graphing calculator.
- Use response prompts. Multiple-choice, true-or-false, check box answers, polls, and short answers can be used for response prompts.
- Create a game such as a quiz game, game show, matching label reveals, and sorting activities.
- Encourage reflection. This is a great way to see what they know about a topic.
Once your presentation is complete, all you need to do is share the link with your students so they can participate. Using this data, you can see how students are doing with the learning outcomes.
Lumio and Canva together can do so much. By combining them, you can engage and interact with students in different learning environments.
By Sam Fecich
Dr. Fecich is a professor, author, speaker, and educational consultant and can be found on Twitter and Instagram @SFecich. An associate professor of education for eight years, she is the author of EduMagic: A Guide for Preservice Teachers and EduMagic Shine On: A Guide for New Teachers. She holds a Ph.D. in learning, design, and technology from Penn State University. Additionally, she holds a master's degree in special education and in instructional technology from Penn State University. In Pennsylvania, she is a certified instructional technologist in K-12, special education K-12 and pre-K to sixth grade. You can find more of Dr. Fecich's work including her blog and podcast at https://www.sfecich.com.
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