Welcome, welcome everyone. I am super excited to share the Wixie Essentials with you all. Wixie is so much fun and I'm so excited for you and your students to start using it in your classrooms.
My name is Tiffany and I'm on our customer success team here at Wixie and I know that we have a short time together today so we're just going to jump right in. So today we are going to briefly chat about what Wixie is and then we'll look at how you can find and assign various templates and activities and we'll look at how you can review and find the work that your students are creating, how to set up family sharing which is super important, and then we'll take a peek at the Learning Center so that you can continue to find ideas and resources to help you throughout your implementation of Wixie. So Wixie is a digital canvas that your students can use to showcase their learning through a variety of different tools.
They can use text, images, original artwork, videos, record their voice to create a variety of different products. They can showcase their work as comics, trading cards, slideshows, digital books, interviews, infographics, animations, so much more and they can just create so many different things. And since Wixie works online, your students will always have access to their accounts regardless of the location that they are at as long as they have an internet connection.
Plus everything in Wixie saves automatically so you'll never get those tears if a student accidentally forgets to save or closes out of their tab or their browser window. They can always come back into Wixie and pick up working right where they left off. But Wixie is so much more than just a student creation tool.
Wixie contains various resources and features that teachers can use to help manage digital project work and just make it super easy for everyone. So there's actually over 3,000 different curriculum activities and templates that you and your students can use. And as a teacher, you can assign these to your students and again, making it super easy for you to be able to manage the work that they're doing.
And students never have to turn anything in. You're always connected to the work that they are doing. And I'll show you that momentarily.
The curriculum library contains tons of different activities that are going to be very specific and standard in line. You can always browse what you're looking for by going through the different folders. You can also search in the search bar at the top by keywords that you're looking for or even by standard.
The month by month folder is a very popular folder that you can review. For instance, August is going to have a lot of back to school themed activities, summer themed activities. So there's a lot of variety in here for the things that you can assign your students.
And the contents in these folders are going to align to the grade levels that you are working with. So always want to just double check your grade level settings in your settings, which you can find in your profile image settings right there. The design template library is going to contain more open ended templates to help support project work.
And if you're just getting started with Wixie and especially with right now being back to school season, the all about me folder is a great place to start. There's a lot of wonderful ideas in here for your first projects. I particularly like the trading card.
I think that's a fabulous one as well as an all about me backpack. This sentence strip is a really great one as well, especially for those littles who are just starting out with those computer skills. All they do is use a paintbrush to write their name, something they like, and then illustrate their project with those various paint tools.
So it's a really fun one. And it's also very powerful for those just beginning to use a computer or a tablet, things like that. Another one that I particularly like is going to be the profile image.
And this is just a fun one for students to use and get familiar with the various authoring tools within Wixie. So to do that, to assign it to your students, all you have to do is click the more button, which is the three little dots. You're going to choose assign.
And then you can view it by class. You can also assign by grade level, which is super handy, say, if you work with all third grade students. So all you have to do is then select the all students button and select save.
And this will take you to your assignments tab so that you can see all of the assignments that you currently have active. And when students log into their Wixie account, they will see their new assignment at the top. So instead of this project prompt right here, it'll say to do and I'll have that little activity right there and they'll just click on it and can get started.
So back to the assignments tab. When you click this again, you can review all of the assignments that you currently have active. You can do it by an end date or all.
You can even view assignments from other teachers that may have assigned things to your students as well. It's going to default to the first class on your roster. But to view other classes, all you have to do is use the class pull down menu, find the class you want to look at, and then just click on that project.
So you get a nice little details page where you can get a preview of all the work that your students have created that is attached to this assignment. So you just click on one and then you can flip through the various pages, see the work that Josh created. You can add feedback here.
You can grade the project. You can share this particular one out if you want to just to share one at a time. And then again, you just use that little next student button at the top to review other work in your class.
This student might have noticed that Martin's project is grayed out. That just means that he hasn't started yet. If you work with a lot of students and you want to get a quick little preview of everything, you just click the students button over here and then you get a status update.
Like we can see again, Martin has not started, Ava's completed it, and these ones are in progress. And so they never have to turn anything in. You're always connected.
You can always see what they're working on, which makes it super handy. One thing I do want to point out is it's really cool in the project or excuse me, in the assignments tab is that if you ever wanted to share all of these projects at one time, all you have to do is just click the select all button, choose a project wizard, and you have all of these wonderful options to be able to share the fabulous things that your students are doing. So lots of great things for you to check out.
If you ever want to view all of the work that you're doing, which is super handy, you just have to click on the students tab. And this is a great place to look as well, because there's a lot of students who like to use Wixie at home or, you know, if they start from a blank projects, you'll definitely want to click that students tab. So you just again, click the classes, pull down menu, choose a class that you want to review, find the student, and then you can review all of the projects that they have ever created.
So again, you're always connected, you can always see everything that they're doing without them turning it in. And if you ever wanted to review it, the same thing, you just click on that project, you can flip through it, look at the little storyboard of all the pages if you'd like. So you can see a nice little overview that, you know, they did do everything on each page.
And you have those same sharing options over here as well that you can do. So we'll head back there. I also want to point out, too, is that if you have students who do create a ton of projects, you'll definitely want to utilize the show pull down menu.
And here you can really filter out the projects that you see. So super handy if you have those that are using Wixie at home or just love to create, being able to search by project's name is super handy. Or even if you have some students who may have accidentally deleted something or they said their project's no longer there, just use that trash option and pull that up and then you'll be able to restore anything if they ever accidentally did that.
So just a nice little tip right there that you can use. So you might have noticed down here on the bottom, there's this handy little printables button. So we're going to go ahead and click that.
The one thing that I want to point out is the family communication invitations. And so this is super important. So family communication or family sharing, it allows parents and caregivers to be connected to the work that their child is doing in your classroom.
So what it does is it allows you and their child to send the parent via email a preview of the project that they have created and also a link so that parents can view the project. So Wixie will not send anything without them opting in and it will only be anything that you or their child sends them. So it's very important to print these out for each student and each student has a unique QR code.
And then the parents will just scan that QR code, put their email in first name, last name and select OK. And they'll automatically be connected. And this, again, just allows them to receive emails from their child or from their child's teacher and with that project and then a link so that they can view, again, all the wonderful, wonderful things that you're doing and see how creative their students being, stay engaged with what's happening in your classroom.
So super, super handy thing to do. If your school or district uses Classlink or Clever, you might want to check your settings to see if we have received that data already. And this is just purely going to depend on your district sharing.
So you'll click your profile image. You're going to go to settings and choose the families option. Use that class pull down menu.
And then if you have a list of email emails under each student, there'll be a email button over here. You'll say email class invites. And all you have to do is just click that email class invite button.
It'll look something like this. And then again, I'll just point out, too, if you ever need to send an individual email to invite a parent, all you do is just click this add button, put in their email. And then they select save and then that will send the parents an email for them to accept and be able to receive the emails.
And like I mentioned, if you do have emails in here and you go from Classlink or Clever, you'll have that purple little invite button
there. And you'll also have this email class invite button. So you just click that and then that will send an invite to every single, you know, every single student's parents that you have information for.
If you ever need to print off an individual invite again, all you have to do is just print this little invite sheet and it'll just be for that specific student. So very, very handy there. So the biggest thing, you know, to take away from this is it's super important to have the parents opt in just to allow you and their child to send them the projects.
Like, again, we won't send them anything without their consent. So what's really cool about it is that, you know, we can go in again to students and we're like, let's find this cute one here. Go to Josh.
And we think Josh made a really great project and we want to share it with our parents. All we have to do is click the share button and choose family. And that's going to automatically send his parents as long as they opted in that email so they can review all that fabulous work.
And we actually have a handy guide as well that you can find in the design templates teacher folder guides that will walk you through all of that process as well. So if you ever have questions about it, you can always look in there. And the next up for us is the Learning Center.
So the Learning Center is a collection of all of our resources to help you make the most of your time with Wixie. Here you can stay up to date with the latest updates in Wixie. You can explore articles that might be interesting for you in your class.
We have wonderful blogs on different learning strategies, training, excuse me, product ideas, monthly ideas, literacy, effective integration. There's a wonderful new blog on how you can add videos to all of your projects and from our fabulous video gallery that we have. So it's really, really great, great ideas in here that you can review on using Wixie.
We also have these great training courses as well, and I definitely recommend checking these out if you're new to Wixie. You'll want to start out with the Wixie Fundamentals. And this is a really wonderful place to start so you can review videos.
There's handy little printables that you can review in your class or hang up and include in your class. And then also additional information for things for how you can use Wixie. And you'll want to check out again as well, the Getting Started with Students.
There's some fabulous first projects in here that you can, you know, have your students do. You can print them out and then you can also click on this and it will take you to the template so you can see what it's like and then assign it to your students as well. So super, super handy.
We'll head back to that learning center. The other thing I wanted to point out in here is that we have webinars all of the time, so you can see upcoming webinars that we have and you can also watch on-demand webinars from anything that we've had in the past. Some of these are from our Tech for Learning Innovative Educators, so I highly recommend checking those out as well.
And then again, here are our integration guides that you can review as well. And I do want to showcase our lesson ideas. So in here, you can browse for various ideas with the search bar at the top or you can browse by the subject area as well.
And there are a ton of activities in here that you can check out. I think language arts alone, there's over 200. So it's really, really fun ideas that you can use, like Adaptive Pattern Story, which has some really wonderful ideas for things that you can do with your students.
There's some really great back-to-school ones that you can check out as well, like the back-to-school design projects. And many of them will have a button so you can click on the template, review it, again, assign that to your students all right in here and even save it to your favorites folder, which is a nice collection of all these templates that you would like to review or come back to. We'll head back there.
And I do want to point out as well at the very bottom, just signing up for the Wixie newsletter. It'll just be an email once a month with helpful and handy tips for how you can make the most out of your subscription to Wixie. And my very last thing, I know this was the last one, is I just wanted to point out our help library as well.
So if you have any questions about how to do certain things in Wixie, you can always browse our help center and come in here. There's hundreds and hundreds of articles to help support you. If you can't find quite what you're looking for, just ask.
We have an ask button down here and you can put in a question and someone on our team will get back to you right away. So that's all I have for you guys. Thank you so much for spending your time learning a little bit more about Wixie.
I really appreciate that. And I'm super excited for you all to get started. Thanks again.
