Haiku Deck Update

Although I'm committed to broadening the types of assessment in the freshman class and providing opportunities to create, I have to say that evaluating 80 Haiku Deck assignments was rather time-consuming. But at least I had some great photos to look at. Despite a few glitches, Haiku Deck worked well and remains one of my favorite iPad apps.

 I was happy with the results overall, but of course some tweaking of instructions will happen before I try this again, as I think I will, next year. For one thing, next time I will take the time to discuss putting the citation of the textbook that is their source into a proper format.

Click here to see an example of their work, and here for another example.  

Haiku Deck

Fairly recently our school added PowerPoint/Keynote to the already great Speech class that all frosh take, and last year freshmen began to take a course called Design Foundations, an art course that also encompasses design for electronic media. Fantastic stuff. But, my current 80 freshmen won't see any of this until next semester.

This is one reason I was excited to discover Haiku Deck this summer. My students have begun a little project in which they will, I hope, review and present in a graphic form some of what they have learned in the first section of our book. I don't want to spend a lot of time teaching things they will learn soon enough, but I did introduce them to the concept of Creative Commons and needing permission to use photos that might be displayed on the internet.

Haiku Deck takes care of that, so they don't have to. It's possible to search only for CC photos. A link automatically appears displaying the photographer's name, and another link connects to the photographer's Flickr page for full information.

In terms of design, students will learn, next semester, to Keep It Simple... Sweetie. Haiku Deck does that, too. The amount of information that can be placed on a slide is limited, so there will be no slides packed with words; I am hoping students will be forced to synthesize information they have learned. If they choose good photos, the likelihood of a nicely designed, good-looking slide "deck" is great -- I think!

I'm looking forward to seeing the results within the next couple of days. As much as I love Haiku Deck, I am thinking that when I have second-semester freshmen I will do this particular project with Keynote so that students can practice their newly-learned skills from the previous semester.