Three Alternatives to Glogster

This morning I received an email from a reader who was looking for an alternative to Glogster. For those not familiar with Glogster, it was a darling of the ed tech world about six or seven years ago when it empowered users to make free multimedia collages. Teachers everywhere had students making multimedia collages to summarize topics, events, and books. Glogster was free for a while then shifted to a subscription model. Here are three tools that your students can use to create multimedia collages.

Buncee:
Buncee is essentially an online slideshow. But you can save your Buncee offline as an interactive PDF which makes it a great way for students to build ebooks. A Buncee can also be used as an online invitation to an event. When you have completed the creation of your Buncee you can select "RSVP" when you share it and recipients will have an option to register their interest in attending your event.

Within Buncee there is an integrated image search which pulls images from Bing. The search is filtered for Creative Commons licensed images. Any image that a student chooses to use in his or her Buncee is automatically added to a list of citations.

Buncee has a huge catalog of stock images and animations that students can add to their slides. During the demonstration that I saw, a running dog animation was added to a slide. That animation played on a continuous loop until the slides were advanced.



Adobe Spark:
Adobe Spark is a suite of free tools for creating images, videos, and simple web pages. Adobe Spark can be used in your web browser or you can download the Adobe Spark video, image, and web page iPad apps. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how to create images, web pages, and videos with Adobe Spark in your web browser.

Key features of Adobe Spark's web app include an integrated Creative Commons image search tool, the option to download images as JPEGs, and the option to download your videos as MP4 files.



Pic-Collage:
Creating collages can be a good way for students to organize their thoughts in a visual manner. In creating their collages they are organizing images that may later become writing prompts for them. I've had students create collages as a way to summarize field trips. Pic Collage is the app that I like for doing that activity. Pic Collage is a free app available for Android and iOS devices. The collage you see above is a very basic use of the app on my Android phone.

After creating a collage students can add interactive elements to it by using Thinglink. Watch the two videos that I made and embedded below to learn how to use Pic-Collage and ThingLink to create interactive collages.




Disclosure: Buncee is a client of MindRocket Media Group. I am a minority partner in MRMG.

Digital Storytelling With the Latest Version of Buncee Edu Mobile

Buncee is a nice tool that makes it easy for young students to craft digital stories. Recently, Buncee updated their iOS app to optimize for iPad and iPhone displays. The latest version of Buncee's iOS app brings the best content creation tools of the Buncee Edu web app to the iOS environment.

Buncee Edu provides students with a wide variety of multimedia elements to their presentations. To add multimedia content to their Buncee slides students simply tap the "add" button then they can choose from videos (available from Vimeo and YouTube), animated characters, animated text, animated stickers, static stickers, audio from SoundCloud, images from Pixabay (filtered public domain images), and upload their own content from their iPad camera rolls. Students also have the option to draw directly on their slides.

Applications for Education
Buncee's free iPad app provides students with a great way to tell fiction and non-fiction stories. Students can create visual and audio stories about field trips, summer adventures, or a favorite personal story. Buncee's iPad app could also be used by students to create an alternative to the traditional written book report. They could use images and sounds to summarize the highlights of a favorite book.

Disclosure: Buncee is a client of MindRocket Media Group. I am a partner in MindRocket Media Group.

How to Add Multimedia Elements to Buncee Slides

Last week I wrote a comparison of adding media to Buncee slides and adding media to Google Slides. Over the weekend a couple of people emailed me for more information about how to add media to Buncee slides. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how to add animations and videos to Buncee slides.


Disclosure: Buncee is a client of MindRocket Media Group. I have a financial interest in MindRocket Media Group.

Buncee v. Google Slides - Which Offers Better Multimedia Options?

Anyone who has read this blog for more than a month or two has probably figured out that I love Google Apps including Google Slides. Sharing, collaborating, and publishing Google Slides is convenient and easy. But sometimes it feels like the ease of using Google Slides comes at the expense of not having as many multimedia options as other slide creation tools.

Buncee is a slide creation tool that makes it incredibly easy for young students to add a wide variety of multimedia elements to their presentations. To add multimedia content to their Buncee slides students simply click the "add" button then they can choose from videos (available from Vimeo and YouTube), animated characters, animated text, animated stickers, static stickers, audio from SoundCloud, images from Pixabay (filtered public domain images), and upload their own content from their desktops. Students also have the option to draw freehand directly on their slides.

Compared to Google Slides Buncee has more video and audio options. While you can draw on Google Slides that requires the use of Google Drawings whereas on Buncee slides students just choose the pencil icon and start drawing.

Applications for Education
If you have been looking for a Google Slides alternative for elementary school students, Buncee is a good option.

Right now Buncee has a bunch of Mother's Day templates that your elementary school students can use to create digital Mother's Day cards. Those cards can also be printed.

Disclosure: Buncee is a client of MindRocket Media Group. I am a partner in MindRocket Media Group. 

Buncee Buddies Connects Classrooms for Earth Day

Earth Day is a little less than a month away. This year Buncee wants to see what you and your students are doing to recognize Earth Day. Buncee Buddies is a free service that connects classrooms to Skype and or share messages through Buncee cards. Buncee Buddies: Earth Day 2016 aims to connect classrooms around the world to explore how they celebrate Earth Day in their parts of the world. Teachers worldwide can register their classes for the project and create Buncees about the importance of environmental protection, methods of execution, and what the local environment is like in their corner of the world.

Click here to register your classroom for Buncee Buddies: Earth Day 2016.



Disclosure: Buncee is a client of MindRocket Media Group. I am a partner in MindRocket Media Group.

Organize Research While Creating Slides on Buncee

For years I've used the slideshow creation process as a means of organizing my thoughts. I teach the same idea to students. The process of sequencing slides and elements within slides can help students organize the ideas that they will later write about in a research paper or persuasive article. Buncee is one of the tools that students can use in that process.

Last month I wrote a post in which I featured Buncee's integrated image search. The integrated image search within Buncee makes it easy for students to find appropriate images and animations to use within their multimedia slide presentations. Organizing slides within Buncee is a simple drag-and-drop process. Using the drag-and-drop process can be a good way for students to organize their thoughts and their research.

To get started organizing ideas in Buncee students can search for images, videos, animations, and audio files related to their chosen keywords. Once they have found media assets that they like students can drag and drop them into place on their slides. The drawing tools within Buncee slides can be used by students to draw connections between items in their slides. If students create slides out of order or later decide that there is a better sequence, they can simply drag and drop slides into a new order.



Disclosure: Buncee is a client of MindRocket Media Group. I am a partner in MindRocket Media Group.

Three Neat Features of Buncee - Create Multimedia Stories

Buncee is a great tool for creating multimedia stories. Earlier this week two of Buncee's team members gave me a tour of all of the features available to teachers and students within the Buncee platform. Three features stood out to me during that tour. Those features are animations, integrated image search and citation, and hyperlinked writing.

What is a Buncee?
At its core a Buncee is essentially an online slideshow. But you can save your Buncee offline as an interactive PDF which makes it a great way for students to build ebooks. A Buncee can also be used as an online invitation to an event. When you have completed the creation of your Buncee you can select "RSVP" when you share it and recipients will have an option to register their interest in attending your event.

Three Neat Features of Buncee
Within Buncee there is an integrated image search which pulls images from Bing. The search is filtered for Creative Commons licensed images. Any image that a student chooses to use in his or her Buncee is automatically added to a list of citations.

Buncee has a huge catalog of stock images and animations that students can add to their slides. During the demonstration that I saw, a running dog animation was added to a slide. That animation played on a continuous loop until the slides were advanced.

All images and text added to a Buncee slide can be hyperlinked. Those links can be to webpage or, as I saw earlier this week, they could be to videos and or sound effects.

Check out the Buncee slides embedded below for a complete overview of all of the features available in Buncee.


Disclosure: Buncee is a client of MindRocket Media Group. I am a partner in MindRocket Media Group.

Buncee - Create Nice Multimedia Stories

Buncee is a nice tool that students can use to create multimedia stories. Students can use Buncee in the web browser on their computers or they can use Buncee's free iPad app to create multimedia stories.

On Buncee students can create a visual story that is unveiled as a viewer scroll across the page. Buncee stories can also be set to play automatically when they are viewed. Students create their Buncee stories by adding custom background templates to Buncee slides. To each template students can add animations, pictures, text, drawings, and videos. Buncee provides a large gallery of media that students can use in their stories. Additionally, students can import media from their computers, from YouTube, from Vimeo, from Dropbox, from SoundCloud, and from Gooru. Completed Buncee projects can be viewed online and or saved as PDFs.

Watch the video below for a short overview of how Buncee works.


Applications for Education
Buncee can be a great tool for students to use to create multimedia stories and presentations. Buncee's gallery of animations is what makes it stand-out from the crowd and appeals to elementary school students.