Three Ways to Create Digital Collages to Summarize the School Year

The sun is shining, the weather is warming, and kids are getting antsy. That combination means that the end of the school year is drawing near. Last week I shared five ways to quickly create audio slideshow videos for end-of-year events. I wrote that thinking about teachers making the videos to play at events at the end of the school year. Students could also use make the videos. Or you might have students make digital collages to showcase their personal highlights of the school year. These are my three favorite tools for creating digital collages.

Pic Collage & Pic Collage Edu
Pic Collage is a free app that I have had on my phone and iPad for many years. The app provides lots of free, customizable templates for making collages. To create a collage simply open the app, choose a template, and import pictures from your phone or tablet's camera roll. You can pinch and zoom to change the size of your pictures, you can add digital stickers, and you can draw or type on your collage.

There is an EDU version of the Pic Collage iPad app, but that version costs $1.99.



Canva
For the last five or six years Canva has been my go-to online tool for making graphics and collages. Canva offers tons of free templates for making collages that you can post online and or download as PDFs to print. Canva can even make people like me who have no graphic design skills look good.


Adobe Spark Web Page
Web Page is a part of the Adobe Spark suite of tools. With Adobe Spark Web Page your students could create a simple web page to showcase their personal highlights of the school year. Adobe Spark Web Pages are displayed in a simple linear view. The pages that students create can include pictures, text, and videos.

How to Add a Calendar to an Edublogs Page or Post

Having a calendar page on your classroom blog is a good way to help keep your students and their parents informed about upcoming events and due dates. Google Calendar is the tool that I prefer for making public event calendars because whenever I update the calendar it is automatically updated wherever it is displayed including in blog pages and posts. In the following video I demonstrate how to add a Google Calendar to an Edublogs page or post.


As I explained in the video, I prefer to add the calendar to a page rather than a post. The reason for that is that if you add it to a post, it will be treated just like any other post and will fall off the homepage after you add a few more posts to your blog. If you add the calendar to a page, that page will always be present on your homepage where parents and students can quickly locate it.

Learn more about Google Calendar in my online course, Getting Going With G Suite. The next course starts on June 3rd. Register early for a discount.