Fostering Creativity with Voki, Piktochart, and Thinglink

Happy Wednesday! I hope your day is as peaceful and lovely as the Apple TV National Geographic screensaver. Yesterday I caught Terri for a quick tech chat and we were brainstorming "next level" ideas for students who had completed their Weebly websites and wanted to take their creativity/web-design skills to the next level (see previous post on student web design). Many applications now allow students to easily create graphic and animated elements that can be embedded directly onto a website. A few of our current favorites are Voki, Piktochart, and Thinglink.

Integration Idea
The three tools we are introducing today are great for challenge options to foster creativity, but they all serve very different purposes.

Voki
This tool allows your students to create speaking avatars. The avatars and backgrounds can be customized, and students can record their own voice or type and choose from a voice bank with various accents. View Terri's classroom site to see how she uses Voki for an introduction on her website. The Voki below was created to support a final student project.



Piktochart
Piktochart is an easy and free infographic creator. Students can drag and drop elements into pre-made templates for banners or infographics. This is a great way to visually show information, represent data, or make a persuasive argument.

Thinglink
Thinglink allows you to take a still image and place tags on it that link out to other websites, which could contain images, video, or anything else you can think of putting on a website! For student projects, try linking to items that they have uploaded to their Google Drive. The example below shows a basic Thinglink designed to support a student project.



How to...
Please let me know if I can support you in getting started with any of the tools described above. Once you have created your Voki, Piktochart, or Thinglink, you can embed it into a Weebly site by following the directions below (no coding experience needed!):

• Press the export arrow or publish button (depending on which application you are working in) to share the element you created.
• Select the embed code and copy it (keyboard shortcut for this is holding the  "Command ⌘" and "C" buttons at the same time). 

• In edit mode on your Weebly site, drag over the embed code element. 

                                                             

• Select "Edit Custom HTML" and paste the code in by using the keyboard shortcut "Command⌘" and "V".

• Publish your website, and look at the published view (not editing view). Your element should appear directly on the page!

Happy embedding! As always, let me know how I can support you in your tech integration endeavors.