As a teacher you’re often responsible for building engaging resources & materials that encourage & inspire your students. While it’s certainly possible to build items using Word or other generic platforms, these have grown to become uninspiring in a time where good design is ever present & much easier to achieve then it once was.
So with this in mind, I wanted to share a collection of resources you can use to generate some impressive material for use in you classes.
Canva
Canva is a powerful, free graphic design tool that’s perfect for all sorts of design elements. It’s fully loaded with enough easy-to-use features & fill the gap templates that ANYONE can create a variety of engaging content that gets shared & consumed. Everything from social media posts though to flyers can be produced inside of the platform for free.
How can PE Teachers use it?
- Parent communication Letters
- Promotional Flyers
- Lesson/Activity Task Cards
- Learning Intention Posters
- ….anything you can think of
Comic Life
Comic Life is a super simple comic publishing software available for Windows, Mac OSX & iOS devices. The app is designed to create comic pages using digital photos, by leveraging the users own photos & layout templates. Comic Life has an integrated camera feature that allows the user to snap a picture and add it directly to a comic.
The options for utilising Comic Life in a PE setting are vast, essentially enabling you to quickly produce engaging content in a matter of minutes. Take a look at Kevin Tiller from a recent episode of PE Geek TV exploring how he uses it.
Download Comic Life for iOS here
Need to communicate learning material, processes or weighty information to your students? How about turning it into an infographic? In a little over two years, infographic search volumes increased over 800 percent. They’re a super powerful way to showcase help people digest information, but not everyone has the design know-how to create them.
Enter Piktochart which gives non-designers the ability to create basic infographics without relying on expensive & complicated design software.
How can PE Teachers use it?
- Create a visually engaging list of rules & expectations for your PE Classroom
- Turn that boring worksheet into an icon driven engagement machine
- Explain a process visually
Anyone who follows this website knows that I often talk about ‘Time’ being our ultimate commodity & one in which we regularly abuse. As a teacher, you have a million things to do & too often we find ourselves doing things we simply shouldn’t be. This can include creating classroom resources & engaging material.
While it may not seem obvious at first, you have a finite capacity & if you’re spending time creating a flyer for your Field Day, you’re also not spending precious time with your family, your own health or on other more important tasks such as curriculum development or assessment.
So how can you leverage your own time? By outsourcing, thats how! Enter Fiverr a global online marketplace offering tasks and services, beginning at a cost of $5 per job performed. The site is primarily used by freelancers who use Fiverr to offer services to customers worldwide. The sheer variety of tasks you can get completed on Fiverr is astounding. This gives you the ability to have someone, who is most likely far more talented that you build something of value, while you work on things only you can do.
While you might struggle to think you can afford to pay someone $5 to make a poster or proofread your latest parent letter, I urge you consider how you much an hour of your time is actually worth. Once you do this you will be in a better position to know exactly what you should be spending you time on. If you want to dive deeper into this topic, then checkout the following episode of the PE Geek Podcast below;
So how are you producing resources & classroom material for your students? Have you ever outsourced a task to a colleague or freelancer?
