Review by Marianne Rogowski, Common Sense Education | Updated February 2019
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Buncee for Education

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Easy-to-use slideshow tool offers customization, promotes creativity

Subjects & skills
Subjects
N/A
Skills
  • Communication & Collaboration
  • Creativity
Grades This grade range is based on learning appropriateness and doesn't take into account privacy. It's determined by Common Sense Education, not the product's publisher.
3–12
Great for:
Common Sense says (See details)
Teachers say (6 Reviews)
Price:  Free, Paid
Platforms:  Website

Take a look inside

7 images
The creator studio is simplistic in design but has lots to offer.
The teacher dashboard allows for student grouping and differentiation.
Create Buncees for your students, have students create them, or both.
Choose from lots of different items to customize your slides, including interactive media and animations.
Use templates, pre-created slides, and presentations, or start from scratch.
Balance text and pictures depending on your grade level and purpose.
Take advantage of the sharing gallery, choosing by grade level and subject area.

Pros: From video to hand-drawn images to pre-created templates, it's possible to add content in just about any format imaginable.

Cons: The boards can get cluttered quickly, and top-notch features come with a cost.

Bottom Line: With the right guidance, the abundance of design features make creating dynamic presentations a breeze.

How Can I Teach with This Tool?

Start with a blank Buncee board or work from a template to take your students on a virtual field trip to Stonehenge, Spain, or outer space, using audio, video, and animations to bring places to life. Have kids create individual slides on a shared board to make a collaborative presentation about cell structure or to retell a story. Use the clip and stitch tool to create a presentation from students' best slides, and share the board to teach a concept. Create Buncees for online story time by recording yourself reading a book and including supplemental clips and activities to enhance comprehension. Foreign language teachers can take advantage of the practically limitless content options to design or assign presentations where students video themselves speaking, practicing vocabulary, or reading aloud. In any subject area, give kids a chance to teach each other by using the comment feature to provide feedback, improve writing, or correct inaccuracies.

In a hurry? Copy one of the shared Buncees from the gallery, and modify it to align with your lesson objectives. Or encourage kids to think outside the classroom and develop marketing materials for school dances, clubs, or logo contests with the different-size design options. This gets kids and teachers in the habit of designing for authentic and meaningful purposes.

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Put this tool into practice:

Buncee for Education is a versatile platform where teachers and students create and share multimedia presentation boards by adding Buncees, or slides. The site (iOS and Chrome app, too) offers simple, free-to-try tools for creating slideshows that can be embedded or shared via email, social media, QR code, or URL. The simple interface helps students create slideshows easily. Students start by naming the project and then work through the menus to add content to the slides in the form of drawings, animations, videos, emojis, stickers, and tons of other design features. There's an extensive image library as well as options to search for online images, music, and videos, though some content may be inappropriate or blocked by school or district filters. Just be sure to teach kids about giving proper credit for content they find online. Users can also get inspiration from the blog and make copies of boards contained in the gallery.

The free version is limited to one board with up to three Buncees (slides); an upgrade to a Classroom Lite or Classroom Plus account allows teachers to create classes through the dashboard, where they can assign, accept, clip, and grade individual and group boards. Rosters can be imported via CSV file or synced through Microsoft Office 365 or Google Classroom.

Like any presentation, a Buncee will only be as good as the content it contains. Buncee offers many add-ons that students could use in their presentation: text, animation, video, recording, stickers, lists, drawings, quizzes, QR codes, etc. The list is pretty long and can help customize a presentation, making each student's work unique. 

With so many choices, it's easy to come up with ideas for engaging presentations, but using (and teaching students to use) effective design techniques will be paramount to the tool's effectiveness. An abundance of visual options could lead to poorly designed or cluttered presentations. When assigning projects to students, teachers should be clear about their expectations. Provide examples, modeling and scaffolding to help support students' creation. Encourage students to explore the gallery or use available templates as they develop their design skills. Within the tool, give students limits so that the visual resources enhance, rather than overpower, their projects. 

Overall Rating
Engagement Is the product stimulating, entertaining, and engrossing? Will kids want to return?

An attractive, easy-to-use, full-featured interface may help get kids more engaged in the process of creating presentations. Buncee boards promote collaboration and peer-to-peer feedback. 

Pedagogy Is learning content seamlessly baked-in, and do kids build conceptual understanding? Is the product adaptable and empowering? Will skills transfer?

Students can learn valuable presentation, communication, and design skills. Teachers can create customized lessons for flipped instruction or multi-modal assignments. 

Support Does the product take into account learners of varying abilities, skill levels, and learning styles? Does it address both struggling and advanced students?

It's easy to get started, and there are plenty of places to go for text and video support. Screen readers, drawing features, recording tools, and grouping options for differentiation stand out.

Common Sense Reviewer
Marianne Rogowski Media specialist/librarian
About our ratings and privacy evaluation.

Teacher Reviews

(See all 6 reviews) (6 reviews) Write a review
Featured review by
Barbie M. , Classroom teacher
Classroom teacher
Carrollwood Day School
Tampa, United States
Buncee is such an incredible tech tool that has totally transformed learning in my classroom! It inspires creativity in all students while giving them a choice and a voice in the entire learning process!
Buncee is an incredible technology tool for any classroom. I love how user friendly Buncee is. I learned really quickly, once you introduce students to the Buncee canvas - MAGIC happens. Students eagerly begin exploring and creating. Students are so inspired to create and actually beg to Buncee which is truly music to any teacher's ears. I love how student creativity is inspired by Buncee. I have seen students go above and beyond while using Buncee. Had they been given another tool or traditional paper ...
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