Feb 13, 2023

Create an App

When it comes to building a mobile app, the MIT App Inventor is always my first recommendation. It’s free and the folks at MIT who host it provide a lot of excellent resources to support teachers. Even if you’ve never created an app yourself, the resources offered by MIT can help you help your students create a fully functioning mobile app. Here’s an MIT App Inventor tutorial I published.

Build a Virtual World

CoSpaces is a popular platform that offers students the ability to create their own animated virtual worlds. Students can start by building a simple animated scene with the premade artwork available to them in CoSpaces. Once they have the basics they can keep going to build an entire virtual world environment. Here’s the official CoSpaces introductory tutorial for teachers.

Design a Local History Virtual Tour

For a few years I was a huge proponent of students using Google’s VR Tour Creator to create virtual tours of local history landmarks. When Google shuttered that tool, I pivoted to using Expeditions Pro. Watch this video to learn how you can create your own virtual reality tours with Expeditions Pro.

Create a Video Game With Construct 3

Construct 3 is a video game creation platform that students can use to develop their own games. The games students can create with Construct 3 aren't simple quiz-based games like many other platforms offer. Construct 3 offers students an opportunity to create games that might remind you of some classic video games like Mario Brothers, Zelda, or Space Invaders.

There are a couple of aspects of Construct 3 that make it appealing for classroom use. First, the visual drag-and-drop nature of Construct 3 makes it accessible to students who don't have prior programming experience. Second, for students who do have some prior programming experience, Construct 3 does include options for development via Javascript while still being able to refer back to the comfort of a block interface.

Publish Animations

I started this year by introducing you to Adobe’s Animate from Audio tool. That’s a fun tool for making simple animations. I like to have students create animations to illustrate their understanding of various concepts they’ve learned.

Enroll in my Animated Explanations course if you want to learn even more about making animations and teaching with animations in your classroom.

My daughter's school was unexpectedly closed last Monday. I took the day off to take her skiing for the day. It was a learning experience for both of us. If you're interested, you can read about it here.

These were last week’s most popular posts:

1. 10 Tools for Gathering Real-time Feedback From Students

2. Three Tools for Detecting Writing Created by AI

3. New Padlet Feature! Present Padlet Walls as Slideshows

4. The Makers of ChatGPT Have Launched a Tool to Detect Text Written With AI

5. 75 Google Documents Tutorials

6. How to Set Expiration Dates for Google Docs

7. Learning About Languages and The Mysteries of Vernacular