Easelly is an engaging, effective tool for learning. Students interact with content in new ways by creating infographics and gaining experience using quick-create presentation technology. The site's variety of resources and examples entice users and encourage creativity. Creating an infographic is empowering to students by allowing them to have greater control over their own learning. Students can have meaningful experiences with the content they produce.
In one of the two inquiry-based learning classes that I teach each day, I intentionally and purposefully planned that students would use easel.ly to transform mathematics content to produce a visual that clearly displayed their thinking. Each collaborative team was assigned an authentic performance task. Upon finding the solution, the team created a model that represented their method(s) to solve. The photos below document students' first foray into digital creation and presentation in our class.
Danielle and Alissa are eager to capture a Google image to use in their infographic. They grapple with the process before discovering the bank of images readily accessible in easelly's suite of tools. The choice of images was dependent upon their ability to synthesize, transfer, and apply their knowledge of fractional algorithms to that of models.
Hailey, Rayshawn, and Dawson quickly demonstrate proficiency in the mathematics content standard as well as in the use of the easelly infographic maker!
Hailey and Rayshawn (foreground) provided descriptive feedback after Danielle shared her team's infographic. Danielle is justifying the mathematics model that she and Alissa created using the infographic maker, easelly. Dawson and Alissa (background) are engaged in rigorous discourse about the algorithms used to solve.
Collaborative learning teams rotated, Gallery Walk style, from Chromebook station to Chromebook station, to analyze and evaluate the easelly infographic created by each team using the self-assessment/peer-assessment rubric provided. Then, teams were asked to return to their own station to use the completed rubrics to tweak their models before submitting them for summative assessment. This is a photo of two collaborative teams debriefing the metacognitive process - solution, creation, self and peer review, descriptive feedback for improvement, and assessment.
An Enthusiastic Thumbs-Up: Student Reviews
Aysha exclaimed, "Easelly is awesome! I love that I have the option to choose an existing template, or I can create my own. In math, for me, it is much easier to visualize and create the fraction models without the distraction a busy template may cause.
Dawson queried, "Will we use easelly in your class everyday, Mrs. Hunter? Designing the models to represent our thinking was much more difficult that I expected it to be, but now that we've had the opportunity to see what the easelly creation tool can do, I can hardly wait to try it again!"
Bailey, my student who rarely speaks aloud in class, tugged on my sleeve before leaving class on this day and whispered, "Will we have the chance to use easelly to share our thinking again?" "Why do you ask?" I responded. I had worried that this create and present process might be too much for him; however, I was surprised and delighted when Bailey quipped, "I am a man of few words, Mrs. Hunter. For me, it is so much better to create a visual to communicate what I'm thinking."
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