The first tool I explored was Quozio. It was simple to use, free and very practical. I even added the bookmarklet to my toolbar so that when I see a quote in an article, I can easily create a quick image of it to display. I chose to use it a little differently for this assignment though. I am making an I-movie to advertise my Summer Reading Circle program and thought this was a perfect tool to create a question for the students without having to use the limited text options on I-movie. The quote turned out great! I could see myself using this tool for Facebook and Twitter as well.
The next tool I explored was Stencil. This tool reminded me a lot of Canva (which I love). I think I could easily learn to love this tool as much as Canva. The free account only allows 10 projects a month, but for my purposes that is fine. I don't feel like there are as many free options as Canva for images and backgrounds, but uploading images is an option. I do like that all the free images and icons are at the top of the selection list, unlike Canva which has the free content scattered throughout the options. I also kind of like the quote feature although I didn't use it for this assignment. I did however use all the other tool options for this assignment. I created another image for my Summer Reading Circles I-Movie and was able to do it within 10 minutes.
After exploring Stencil I decided to explore, the Noun Project, which I had never heard of. It is a really neat concept. I created a simple book icon. I added the color blue to it, but it didn't work. After I went back I realized that I needed to upgrade to the Pro version if I wanted to add color. As simple as the tool is, I decided that it was way more valuable than I had originally thought. I started downloading as many icons as I could and created a folder on my desktop so that when I wanted to have icons I had my own little library to pull from. Then I thought of an immediate use for some of the icons. I am going to be providing online PD for some of the faculty next year (in a similar fashion to this class), and I needed images (icons) to use for each stage of the inquiry model. I quickly used this tool to find images and imported them into my website. I am so happy that I this tool was part of the assignment. The timing couldn't have been better!
This was one of my favorite things, because it allowed for me to play and be creative. I will be coming back to this "Thing" in the future to explore a few more tools!
How cool! I love all the things you created with these tools. Especially the poster for your PD workshops. Those are terrific! Great use of those graphics. Sorry to hear the colors are now part of their pro package. I don't know if I included this link in the lesson or not, but it explains how to color them: http://learninginhand.com/blog/recolor-the-noun-project-icons Should be free, I think.
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