Hi, I am Rachel Delinas. I am an instructional technology teacher in the Howard County Public School System. I started originally as a classroom teacher.
I've taught third, fourth, and fifth grade and now I'm teaching technology, which is my passion and I love doing it. I am a Wixie certified educator as well as a Wixie innovator educator and I absolutely love using Wixie with my students. It provides them so many different tools and options for their creativity.
So this presentation is just going to go through all of the tools and tricks hopefully to teach you a few things and show you the reasons why I love Wixie so much. So these are the ABCs of Wixie. So let's start with A. So the nice thing is you can assign students specific assignments depending on the class or you can do an individual assignment for students, which is really nice.
So if you're making a template, you can differentiate it for the different needs, whether you need enrichment or you need to modify it for students. It's really nice and being able to assign it to specific students is a really nice part of Wixie. B is for backgrounds.
You can add backgrounds. There's a whole background library right here in Wixie and you can put in pictures and create stories and the nice thing is that you can then layer on top of the backgrounds. So when you want to add a background, you just, you know, if they're learning, students are learning about space, they can click on the background.
I'm not going to do it because it'll change my whole presentation, but when you click on it, then it will become a background and that's actually just what I did for this presentation. I just chose a background and I duplicated the slide and that's how I created this as a presentation. So for C, collaboration.
Wixie provides a lot of opportunity for students to be able to work together in real time. So if you have a project, you can have them use teams and the teams will then allow students to work on the same project simultaneously. One really neat thing that my school currently is doing in Wixie with teams is creating our morning announcements.
Because we were virtual, each student was able to put in their own video and we created morning announcements through the use of teams in Wixie, which was a really nice way to be able to collaborate and work together even though we were all separate. So D is for duplicate. A lot of times we make things and you want it to look kind of similar.
So you can duplicate pages. You can duplicate stickers and that's what I did here. So if you click on an image, you can go to edit and then you can just duplicate it and then you can create a whole image.
It just makes it easier than going through all the steps within Wixie, which is really nice. And then you can also duplicate full pages, which is, like I said, how I made this whole presentation. So I was able to create every single page before I started to go in and edit them as individuals.
So it gave the presentation some continuity and I didn't have to recreate the wheel every single time. So for E, I said everyone. Everyone can do Wixie.
My kindergartners are very tech savvy when it comes to Wixie. They sometimes show me, oh, Mr. Linus, did you know that you can, you know, they're very savvy in Wixie, which is really nice because they've been using it all year and they enjoy it so much that they want to use it on their own, which is nice. And then they can play and explore.
All the way through my fifth graders, we use them for different projects. We just created digital citizenship posters in there. So it doesn't matter your age, your skill level, anyone can use Wixie.
So there is a fillet tool that is really nice in Wixie and Wixie provides lots of color choices for you as well as different gradients and different patterns. So right now, I'm clicked on the black, but let me see. If I click on pink and then click, you get lots of different choices of gradients and backgrounds and the students love doing the puzzle and the rainbow is very popular as well, but they love filling in the background.
So F is for the fill-in tool. So G is for gluing images and this is something that I use very often in Wixie because you can layer your stickers and then modify them to the way that you want them to look. So for example, this little girl, the image, I was able to get the Wixie hand on top of her shirt because I was able to glue down the stickers.
So to do that, you go to images and let's just say I have a person. This kind of happens often with the kids. They're like, I can't find someone who looks like me or I'm wearing a green shirt today, whatever silly thing that they want, but you can click on a sticker.
So let's say this is me playing basketball, but I don't really have blonde hair. So I'm able to glue down using this tool and then I'm able to fill in to change the color hair of the girl. So she kind of looks a little bit like me and here's another one of my favorite tools, the undo button.
So you can click and make them kind of modify it so it looks more like that individual student or you can layer it as well. So the glue tool is a tool that I actually use pretty often. So H is for helping students foster creativity.
In Wixie students have lots of choice. They're able to make different things. They're able to play and explore and cultivate their imaginations depending on what they're doing.
So it just gives a whole variety of ways of expanding students thinking. The images are awesome in Wixie. They update them very often, which is really nice.
They have clip art and they also have the pics for learning, which are the real images that you can use. So if you go under images, I kind of showed this before, but under stickers there is plenty of images here depending on what you are looking for. And you'll notice these little folders.
So underneath the folders, I tell my kindergartners means that there are even more stickers and they're like, so then, you know, they click on it. So exciting. And then there's even more stickers.
So you can then click and then there are lots of different choices. You also can search for an image. If you're looking, you know, for like a basketball and search, it will come up with images.
It also comes up with those pics for learning, which are those, the copyright friendly images in there for you. So you know that you can use them without any problems with copyright. There's also images of different, like, you know, real photographs, actually, which are fun.
We did something with the U.S. symbols and the pictures are right here. It just it really easy. So next is J for juggling student work.
The nice thing about having the students work in one place is it saves a lot of time. So when you are in Wixie and you click on students, you see a list of all their names come up and then you can sort by their projects. You can give them immediate feedback right in Wixie, which is a nice tool.
And when it saves, the students are able to see it. You can also give it a grade if you want to grade it right within Wixie. And then for the students, it also allows for them to see all their work in one spot.
So this is just an example of a student's dashboard where they have their reading assignment is there, their math assignment was there, their technology and their science. So all of their work for that day from different teachers was all in one spot. So it makes it easy for students when they're juggling their work, especially for our younger for our younger primary students, when they can see that, like, little picture of the template that they're looking for.
It's right there and they're able to locate it. So this is a new tool that I've used a lot this year, which has been so beneficial for me, is that when students are done, they can mark their assignments as complete. So for K, they're keeping track of students and marking their work as complete.
This tells me as the teacher that they have finished their assignment and I can go in and I can grade it because sometimes students will open something, especially when we were virtual, they'd open it, they'd work, look at it, and then they do something else and maybe they come back. But this gives me a clear view that they are done and I can now go in and assess what they've done and give them that immediate feedback. It also will show you in Wixie if the project's in progress.
So if they've opened the project, however they have not done anything, you can see that as well under their name, which is really nice. That's, yeah, key thing. That's very nice tool.
So for L, locking. So the locking tool is you can lock stickers, which is nice because then when the kids click on it, they can't move it around. So you just saw with my text, I don't have it locked so I can move it all around and kindergartners and first graders love to move everything around.
But when you've worked on a template for a long time and you want things to be in a certain spot, it's nice to be able to lock those stickers because then they can't move them no matter what they do. However, they can still click on the microphone and it will read it to them, which is a really a nice feature that Wixie has that especially for those primary students. So M is month by month templates.
Wixie has many templates under the templates tab that you have on the left hand side and there is a month by month template. This is my go to starting point for each month when I'm trying to think of things that kind of correspond with what the students are doing and the month and any special days. And so under each month, they have templates and they're constantly being updated.
I just got an email that there's now a Cinco de Mayo one for May and some new Mother's Day templates. So it's nice that it's kind of organized in that way. So it's a jumping point.
So like I said, Wixie is constantly adding new tools and new images and new stickers all the time. So this is an example of one that was just some templates that were just added. Let me show you.
So I thought this template was kind of cool. I don't teach music. However, if any of you do, this is they're adding a lot of templates for music teachers, for art teachers in the template area.
So these are already made templates. They come with the directions and they are really great because they're just constantly updating with new stuff and there's new tools. Another thing that Wixie added this year that I love are the choice boards.
So this is a link to the Wixie website, but I just wanted to show you what's already created. These are templates for comprehension, STEM, ELL. And it's nice because, again, it gives the students choice.
So they're able to choose depending on what topic you're doing, how they want to show, you know, their thinking, their thoughts. If they want to write, they can write. If they want to draw, they can draw.
If they want to make videos, it's all there. And these templates are fabulous because they're already made for you. So and they give student choice.
So O, again, it's open for student creativity. Students are able to show what they know in so many different ways and what makes them comfortable. They have the microphone.
They can record their voice. They have the play button where they could make a slideshow. They can record a video of themselves.
They can type. They can paint. And again, I put in a student choice board.
So all of these tools are just different ways that students can show their thinking and show their knowledge. And it's nice because it's not just one way. And every kid is different.
So this allows for that differentiation and for students to really show their best, you know, whatever they're good at, they can show it in that way. Or they can show it in multiple ways, too, which is nice. So there are lots of paint tools in here, which all have different aspects.
So there's the regular paint brush, and then they have different strokes. I like using this one like for my hair because my hair is not, you know, nice and straight like a pencil. The fill in tool I kind of already talked about.
There is a spray can tool that if you click over here on the side, there is lots of different options for students to be able to spray. Like I did a lesson on germs, and the kids had to, you know, the kindergartners had to clean all the germs off their hands and cover it up with the spray can. So it's just fun and something different.
And there's also money and animals. We did a spring project, and the kids loved filling it with ants and snakes using that tool. Anything to gross me out.
So Q, quick response from the Wixie support team. These people are amazing. You send an email, and within minutes somebody has replied to you helping.
How can I help? What can I add? And I really appreciate the fact that they are so responsive so quickly. So thank you to all of you. R is for rubrics.
There are already made rubrics in Wixie. So thank you again to those people who made those. It's a nice way to attach them to the student work that you have already assigned.
You can also make your own rubrics in there. So that's very nice. S is for showcase.
This is a great way to showcase students' work. You can easily pull all of the projects into one spot, and it creates a URL, and you can run it as a slideshow. So it goes through all of the students' work.
So it's nice to be able to have that. And like last year, and I'm going to do it again this year, I just planned it out for my fifth graders for graduation. They each made their own individual slide, and then we were able to send the families the URL at the end of the presentation to them.
They can have a copy themselves to be able to see it. Again, T is for templates. There are so many different options here under each of these folders, whether you are art, music, science, STEM.
There are teacher templates, which are nice. I saw that they just came out with presentation templates, which are awesome. I would have probably used one of those instead of duplicating this.
So thank you for that. Great idea. There are organizers, graphic organizers, whether they are for primary or there's lots of intermediate organizers in there.
But each one of these folders has multiple templates that are already made for you, and all you have to do is go in and assign them to the students. U is for uploading an image or file. So under the images, you can click my files, and you are able to upload images of your own.
We did this this week when we were learning about cicadas. Students had to find images in Britannica Image Quest. They downloaded them, and then they were able to easily import their pictures and cite them right in Wixie, which went really well.
I was surprised how well the kids did. So Student Voice, there is a video tool in here that you can click, and they can create videos. I asked my own kids, because I have a second grader and a kindergartner, just what they thought about Wixie, and so this is how you what it would look like.
So this video, you'll notice, looks a little bit different because I locked the video. So it then gives the option to play it. So if you make a video of yourself, like instructionally for students, and embed it into your presentation, that if you lock it, they can just click on it right here, versus this video looks a little bit different, where I have to click on it and then play it, and then here you can kind of manipulate it.
This one versus this one, you can't. I like Wixie because you can show your teachers, you know, with stickers, the paint tool, or a video like this. So that was his opinion, and then this is my kindergartner's opinion.
I like Wixie because you can draw, paint, and make pictures, and take pictures of yourself. Which he does pretty often in Wixie. So he loves taking pictures of himself, and then adding mustaches and crazy hair, because all he has to do is he goes to the images, he takes a picture, he glues it down, and then he can modify the way that he looks.
And that's right here. All you do is click, record, and add. So it's very, very easy to do.
Wixie has the Wixie Wizard. They're on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. So W is for those wizards, where they give out tips, there's templates, there's tricks.
And it's nice because, you know, I'll be scrolling through Instagram, and then just see something, and I'm like, oh, that's a great idea. I can, you know, use it tomorrow in my lesson. So it's nice to have those just quick snapshots when you're, kind of don't even know you're looking for it.
So next, I did the extra color options. So underneath, there is a, underneath any of the paint tools, there is a little arrow, and when you click on that, it opens a whole color wheel for you. So my art teachers probably know the number codes for some of these down here, but you can type in exactly the number code, and it will identify the exact color that you're looking for.
You also can match colors, which is nice. If you click here on the, I guess like a dropper tool, it will match the color. You can see over here it's changing as I'm going through, and then you're able to modify your work depending on the color.
So you can also embed YouTube videos right in Wixie. So if you've created an assignment for students, especially those if they're at home or doing it independently, the nice thing about this is the videos are ad-free. There's no ads like before the video.
The kids can't click around anywhere else. You're not sending them to YouTube where it's not safe, and they also have the closed caption. Sorry, my screen is a little bit low here.
So they also provide closed captions. So all the students have to do is click on it, and the video automatically starts to play. Wixie provides powerful tools.
Right there within Wixie. So to add the YouTube video, you go to video, and then the link is right here, and you just paste the URL link that you want, and it embeds it right into YouTube for the students to be able to watch in here, which makes me feel better that I'm not sending them out to YouTube, an unsafe website for them. And Z, I said it takes the Z's out of worksheets, the boring worksheets.
The kids can be creative and do different things. So those are the ABCs of Wixie. So thank you so much for coming.
Great job, Rachel. I'm going to stop recording, and then let everybody ask some questions. So here we go.
