How I Use It
In my Spanish class, we used this site to create "catalog" pages for clothing. Students used pictures of clothing that they liked, they chose their themes, colors, fonts, etc., and then they wrote descriptions in Spanish of each clothing item they imported. There were requirements for the descriptions to ensure that students were using an appropriate amount of our focus vocabulary and grammar concepts. In addition, students had to include prices of the items that had been converted to a currency of a Spanish-speaking country of their choice.
In the end, students emailed me the links to their pages and I embedded them on our class website to create a gallery to be seen by all students. Emailing the links and/or embed code only worked on laptops as opposed to the ipads. Some students projects "got lost" even though students claimed to save repeatedly and it save automatically periodically (supposedly).
My Take
This was a fun tool to use! The results look so professional. Smore was a great resource for getting my students to do some writing (without them even realizing it!).
As mentioned, we did run into a few students projects being "lost". Two just hadn't saved updated information, but one is completely gone. I contacted Smore support for help on this and have heard nothing back. We were using the free version, and Smore says that support priority is for the paid users. This issue of projects being lost really concerns me. I would consider getting an educator's account for next year for many reasons, including the increased support. Regardless, student projects disappearing is making me think about this decision more carefully.
Privacy settings (at least on free accounts) need to be adjusted so that "flyers" are not public. Since this would be difficult for me to enforce, I emphasized that my students not include their last names in their projects.
Overall, I really enjoyed allowing my students to use Smore to demonstrate their written knowledge!
