Google Ups Commitment to #CreateWithChrome

As more and more educators call on colleagues to find more ways for their students to use Chromebooks for creative purposes, the Google Mothership is taking steps to make that easier.

Recently Google posted on its Chromebooks in Education page, that a creative bundle will soon be available in the administrative console that features six apps aimed at students producing content and not just consuming it.

The recent additions are:

• Infinite Painter for sketching and drawing
• Squid for charts and diagrams
• Book Creator for storytelling
• WeVideo for video creation
• Soundtrap for music production
• Explain Everything for creating screencasts

While there are tons of sites that foster creativity with Chromebooks, these six are a great start to add to the console. Check out my special page The Chromebook Creativity Project for even resources. 

Six apps that allow kids to #CreateWithChrome will soon be available for installation via the admin console. 

Students excel at spoken word project | Thanks PLN and Soundtrap.com

This past Thursday culminated a great project I facilitated with our Pioneer Tech High School students. In their Character Development and Leadership hour I teamed with teacher Amber Lugten to help students pursue what perseverance means to them and then express it in a unique way.

This really turned out to be a tale of the connected educator. Building upon the concepts of the Rock Our World Project founded by fellow Apple Distinguished Educator Carol Anne McGuire, I set off to have students create some type of collaborative music project...probably in Garage Band. Right about the same time I opened Rushton Hurley's Nextvista.org newsletter and he was telling of a similar cloud-based site called Soundtrap.com and discovered it would probably fit our needs better being web based and built for more for sharing than Garage Band. The kids took to the site like a white t-shirt to hot wings and I happily tweeted some of our successes. One of the first people to respond to my tweet was Soundtrap developer Frederik Posse. He liked the project so much that he offered to upgrade all of our accounts, student ones included to premium accounts. This type of extreme project evolution and upgrade doesn't happen for the educator that isn't deeply immersed in a personal learning network.

The kids worked hard and made seemingly thousands of revisions. I was so proud to accompany them on Maranda's Where you Live TV program that highlights all of the great things happening in West Michigan for kids and families.

Here is our segment and below that you'll find a link to Casey and Josh's project and the full write up from WOTV.



Perseverance Soundtrap Project

Students excel at spoken word project | WOTV4women.com.