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 Use PicCollage - And Five Ideas for Using It In Your Classroom

PicCollage is one of my favorite Android and iPad apps. It is a free that allows you to quickly arrange pictures, video, text, and stickers into collages. From the app you can share your collage to Google Drive, Instagram, Facebook, Dropbox, and many other file sharing services. In the video below I demonstrate how to use it without creating a PicCollage account. Below the video I have five ideas for using in your classroom.


Five ways to use PicCollage in your classroom:
1. Students can develop collages to use as visual introductions of themselves to their new classmates at the beginning of the school year. Have your students create a collage of things that they like to do for fun or their favorite things about school.

2. As an exercise in blogging without writing your students can create collages to summarize a fun day, a weekend, or what they learned during the week at school.

3. When the holiday greeting card season approaches, consider having students create and send digital greeting cards that they develop on PicCollage.

4. As part of a book report assignment have students develop book covers for books they've read. Along the same lines, have them create collages about their favorite parts of books that they have read.

5. Students who struggle to get started on a descriptive writing assignment could benefit from first creating a photo collage about the event or concept that they need to write about. In thinking about the images that they select, they're also thinking about what they will say about each image.

Update: Terri Eichholz suggests using PicCollage for creating mini-yearbooks. Read her post here.