Links and Loves - Engineering Derby, SLATE, IOS update fix, Timeline Makers, An Easy Way to Create a Banner

This week has been an exceptional one!

I had the honor and pleasure to attend a day at the SLATE Conference. Check out these pictures of the fun we had!

My colleague, Val, presented on Robotics and Coding

Can you find me in the crowd? I presented on Virtual Reality

Of course I was using the Oculus VR in our hotel room!

This HS student presenter kept coming to my station to experience the VR app Google Blocks

I also facilitated an Engineering Derby in Mauston, WI with 38 amazing 3rd - 8th graders. 

So much innovation and energy with these students

Snowball sculpture challenge

LED circuitry

Bloxels

How lucky I am to be a part of these incredible experiences. Next week I'm heading to Minneapolis, MN for a technology conference. I'm really looking forward to learning from others and getting my technological geekiness going.

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Now here are this week's links and loves:

Bare with me while I explain something a bit technical.

With the newest IOS update for iPhones, iPads, etc. I noticed that images now save as a HEIC file instead of a JPG or PNG. This is to save space, however, the images need to be a JPG or PNG in order to insert them into a document or video. SO, I found a download called iMazing HEIC Converter. It worked quickly and easily to convert images from HEIC to JPG or PNG.  

A colleague recently shared a new to me timeline creation tool called Tiki Toki. There is a free version and the finished timeline looks very professional and visual.

Sutori is another site I found through one of my colleagues. Sutori is for creating digital stories that are in a timeline format.  The stories can include many types of media and even reflection questions. I definitely need to explore this tool further.

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Curricular Connection

This week I helped some students use our large scale Variquest printer to design banners to display in our Innovation Lab. One of the easiest ways to design a banner is to use Google Drawings. To make the Google Drawing into a poster, the students simply change the size of the drawing to be a banner size such as 12 inches by 72 inches. Also, any text box or image can be rotated vertically so that when we print the banner it prints correctly. We found that most text sizing was too small for our banners, so we used the insert word art to create large text.  To finish the banners, we downloaded them as a PDF file before printing. Click here for an example.