Level 1 students check out an Online Design App ...

I shared the link to Lucidpress with my Level 1 students today. I wanted them to see what it was like, how easy it was and if it would be any good for their first project. We had tried one last year, Pixlr, but I wasn't quite happy with it for what we needed. It was great for image manipulation but no good for layout with text etc ( desktop publishing ).  When we wanted to put text it in, we could only put in a big long sentence, not a block of text, without a lot of fiddling about afterwards. Lucidpress was great for this and even gave you place holder text when you put in a text box. The students seemed to pick it up really quickly and were soon laying out images, text and titles. They even found out that they could share a document and work on it together, which was interesting to know.

When you are putting in an image, there are quite a number of options, but the one that interested me was "team images". If you are all logged in from the same organisation, you can share research images that everyone has uploaded. Very useful.

Here is one of the layouts that my students made today. They shared it with me so I could see it in the app.

When you share a design with some one, you can choose for them to just view it of have editing rights. On the menu, you can click to copy a shared document. This then becomes yours and shows in your list of documents, not in the shared list.

This will be very useful when I want the students to do layout exercises. We tried this last year on Google Drawings and it worked ok, but this app has a lot more to it. I can share the sheet that has the elements that I want them to work with as a view only and they can make a copy themselves. They can then complete the exercise using design terms like scale, proportion, hierarchy, font, etc ......

This is a good layout tool and can be used anywhere on any device as it is online used in the browser.

And... it's free!!

I like this getting the students to check out the apps that they are going to use. We can quickly get rid of any that aren't going to work!!

They liked this one. I think this one is a keeper.