Lately I have been looking at all the wonderful technology we have available to us in Wicomico County. We have so many applications at our disposal, I often wonder if many of us know what wonderful tools we have that will help our students reach higher levels of achievement. With that in mind I have decided to devote a few posts on this blog to sharing and investigating some of the applications available Wicomico County teachers.
Pixie is one of those really cool applications that you may have seen in your Novell window and wondered what is this and how can it help my students. Pixie is a creativity tool that allows students to demonstrate understanding through pictures that they create using the computer. That sounds complicated, but it really isn’t. It is more than using the computer to draw. And it is much easier than you think. Your students will learn it before you do. It is intuitive. You can either have your students do the creating or you can create a learning activity for your students to interact with. Pixie works with students of all ages. It is simple enough for the very young, and yet the older students can take it and run with it.
Pixie is so simple that teachers don’t need to worry about losing instructional time to teaching the program. Students catch on easily and are quickly working, learning the content, or demonstrating understanding.
Tech4learning produces Pixie and also provides wonderful resources on how to use the program as well as a large bank of lesson ideas. Tech4learning also provides the Trading Post where educators can upload templates, lesson plans, and activities to share with other educators. You can download them and use them for free. There is no need to re-invent the wheel. See what other educators are doing with Pixie and try it with your students.
Bonus Features
- Saving Options: You can save your students’ work in common formats such as .jpg which will allow you to use the drawings in other programs such as Word, PowerPoint, Photo Story 3 or Movie Maker. Children love seeing their work displayed. Pixie has a feature that allows you to make a slideshow of the projects with music and transitions.
- Printing: One of the things I really like about Pixie is that it has some really cool printing options. One of the printing options that educators will like is the trading card option. You can have your students do a report on a historical character or book character. Print them as trading cards (9 cards to a sheet) and then jigsaw your class. They can share and trade their cards. They have fun. They share. They learn! Another printing option is the post card. You can have your students research places and create postcards telling about those places. You can print them and make table tents out of them. Use them to group your students.
- ELL: Pixie converts from Spanish to English and visa versa. Great for ELL or foreign language classes.
Lesson Ideas
- Research characters. Make trading cards. This can be adapted to any subject. Have your students reserach a scientist, historical figure, or author.
- Planets: Research, Write, and Illustrate. Put the finished products into a slideshow.
- Poetry: Write and illustrate poetry. Put finished poems into a slideshow with music.
- Angles: Have your students take pictures of things that have angles in them. Insert them into Pixie. Use the drawing tools to identify the angles and tell what type of angle they are.
- Geometry: Have your students take pictures of things and use the drawing tools to identify the geometric shapes.
- All About Me. Have your students create a picture that tells all about them. Print them and display them as an All About Me Quilt.
- Make a Spanish/English dictionary
- ABC Book
- Illustrate open-ended math problems. Show all the ways your students came up with to solve a given problem.
- Illustrate life cycles of animals
- Illustrate food chains
- Create your ideal diet. Put what you eat in a day on a food pyramid.
- Create a postcard from a historical place or a fictional place!
- Book report
- Vocabulary – Word, definition and picture. Put them in a slideshow. Or, print them as trading cards and share for take home study.
If you have tried Pixie, I would love to hear about it. If you want to try Pixie or have questions, I would love to hear that too. Let’s talk about how we can use this wonderful tool to excite our students and increase their comprehension!
Entries (RSS)
April 2nd, 2009 at 11:25 am
I love Pixie but I think my students love it more! It is so easy to use and the students do catch on very quickly like you stated in your blog. I teach Language Arts, Social Studies, & Science so whenever we are publishing something we go right to Pixie. We have made diagrams to practice text features, poems to show our understanding or land forms and symbols of the USA, brainstorming ideas about a topic, comparing/contrasting, and the possibilities are endless. I showed a math teacher on my team that she could use it explore symmetry and show how objects flip and turn. I can’t say enough about Pixie. It is a great program that can be incorporated into any lesson plan.
April 2nd, 2009 at 12:01 pm
Visualizing, diagramming, drawing pictures of an idea is a very powerful tool to share with students. According to Robert Marzano, it is one of the research-based effective techniques for ‘teaching that works’. As a student I always drew diagrams and pictures, not because I am good at drawing ( actually I am not at all, I have to label my cows and cats, because they look the same – like a goat!), but because pictures help me to clarify whatever I am trying to understand or solve. I have always instructed my students to draw and label diagrams of everything, especially vocabulary. It was really nice when I found someone famous ( Marzano) who agreed with me.
So this brings me to Pixie and Imageblender, also by Tech4Learning. My students have used Pixie to draw and label a diagram of their experiment, they saved their image as a jpg and imported it into their Word Doc conclusion of their lab.
My students use Imageblender, which is very similar to Pixie to import their pictures they took with the International Space Station, and then annotate their image, then post it on our EarthKAM wiki. http://earthkam.wikispaces.com/pd.+7+group+4
April 4th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
Since April is poetry month, maybe we could get the RELA teachers at our school to try Pixie. The students could write an original poem or find one they love. They could use Pixie and do a trading card activity with the poems. Let’s try it!
April 6th, 2009 at 9:25 am
How do you access Pixie? It is not in my NAL.
April 6th, 2009 at 9:44 am
This is probably because you are an administrator. You can see it in the lab, or you can go to the Tech4Learning website http://www.tech4learning.com/pixie to see more about it.
April 6th, 2009 at 9:45 am
Laurie,
Using Pixie for poetry month sounds like a great idea! Let’s make a plan!