Students love to be a part of their project and it is easy to make students the star of a show in a beginning of the year All About Me project. Now, imagine transporting your students back in time to be part of the culture they are studying, or taking a first-person approach to writing about an animal, or sharing a personal opinion on a poster to encourage others to take action!

You can get students "into" a Wixie project using your device's camera or taking pictures against a "green screen" in your classroom.  

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For many people, April is testing season. Here are some fresh ideas you can use to encourage student creativity and have fun while still meeting the standards and boosting student thinking skills!  

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"Because writing is thinking and learning requires thinking, students who write as they are learning think more and thus learn more."

Moore, D. W., Moore, S. A., Cunningham, P. M., & Cunningham, J. W. Developing
readers and writers in the content areas K-12

While writing is a crucial part of students literacy, writing also has a crucial place outside the language arts curriculum. Writing across the curriculum, writing in all content areas, has been used for almost 150 years to support student learning. As students express and explain their learning, they reflect and think about content in ways that improve their comprehension. 

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Using chroma key is a great way to transport your students across time and space. What is chroma key?

When you use chroma key, you combine two images (or videos) together by removing a specific color (or making it transparent) from the top image.

When you use chroma key, the top image includes a main character in front of a single color. You may have heard of 'blue screen" or "green screen" because of the common use of these hues.

Even if you aren't familiar with the techniques, you probably have some idea how it works already. Think about a weather reporter. They stand in front of a map that you know isn't really there. That is because the map, or background changes, and they are really standing in front of a green screen.

Using the idea of chroma key, students can become:

• explorers in a different time or place
• protagonists in their own story
• tour guides at historical sites
• part of personalize greetings
• comic book heroes

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Frames has tools that make it perfect for stopmotion, cartooning, claymation, and digital storytelling. While there are a lot of features, it doesn’t have to be difficult to get started.

Like all our tools, you will find Recipe tutorials that can help you learn enough to have the confidence to start with your students. You can follow the tutorial directions to build some really fun curriculum projects, or use them as inspiration. Here are some ideas.

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