Haiku Deck...Do you?

This past week I continued to expand upon my technology bag of tricks as I played around with a new tool: Haiku Deck (http://www.haikudeck.com/app/edit/r6WgFWkIwt). This website allows you to easily create and present a slideshow, much like a powerpoint. It is very user friendly as it walks you through adding text and pictures and even provides you with a large selection of pictures based on key text you've used. 

I'll be returning to my classroom in just a week and will be wrapping up a multiplication unit that my LTS has been working on with my 3rd graders. Since multiplication is a fairly new concept to many, it's essential that they understand the basics of mulitplication as well as the many strategies for solving! 

With this in mind I chose to create a haiku deck reviewing the various strategies (repeated addition, equal groups, arrays, skip counting, etc.). While adding a new slide and formating the text within that slide was very easy, I did struggle to import a picture from a source outside of the website itself. I found that pictures couldn't be centered, or fit to the screen, and would cut off important aspects of the picture. Another slight concern I had was the fact that you have to sign in with an email. I'd love to have my students create their own haiku decks but am not sure how they'd go about doing that without an email address. 

For now, I'll continue playing around with this tool as I find it to be an appealing way to present visual information. I'm hoping the more I play with it, the sooner I'll see a way in which to put this tool in the hands of my third graders! 

UPDATE!

I was able to put this bad boy to the test! (Why I used that expression there I don't know...)

Anyways, my students really enjoyed the simple, clean-cut illustrations because they could easily tell which multiplication strategy I was talking about. I chose to pull it up on my iPad and use AirServer to present it on my SMART Board as I walked around the group. It went like this:

I asked each student to pick a multiplication fact that they knew the product to (they couldn't use 1 or 0 as a factor). They wrote that fact on their white board. I then projected one of the slides on the board showing a way to represent that fact (repeated addition, arrays, etc.) and they had to represent their fact in that way. 

This served as a great way for me to quickly check-in on their progress and see which strategies needed more time (ARRAYS!!). 

Overall, great tool, easy to use and implement in the classroom and one I'd like to try and teach my students to create and use on their own!