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.
Continue readingBuncee 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.