It’s Friday morning. Class is in 20 minutes, and your students are supposed to present the Haiku Decks they’ve been working on all week. But as you’re finishing up your coffee, you’re skimming through an inbox full of emails from students who couldn’t find their projects at the last minute. Sound familiar?

With so many students, email addresses, decks, classes, and shared devices, it’s no wonder teachers sometimes run into trouble finding their students’ projects or accounts. Thankfully, we’re here to help make one part of this equation a lot easier by explaining the best ways to use Haiku Deck for education.

Haiku Deck Classroom

With Haiku Deck Classroom accounts, the teacher and all students associated with a Classroom account will enjoy the benefits of our paid product which includes privacy features, the ability to download decks for offline viewing and editing, the ability to embed YouTube videos in presentations, and more.

Classroom also includes a handful of new features designed specifically for the teacher:

• Classroom management dashboard for adding/removing students
• Course galleries where teachers can review the presentations that students submit in one convenient location.
• Optional Integration with Google Classroom and Google sign-in

Haiku Deck Classroom is affordably priced for educators on tight budgets and department, school, district, and institutional pricing discounts are available. Learn more about Haiku Deck Classroom here.

Creating a Single Account for Your Class

This is probably the easiest method (and our favorite), but it’s not ideal for all classrooms. You can create one Haiku Deck account for your classroom, and your students can all sign in using the same email address and password. This will save their work to the same account, so we recommend having students include their names in the titles of each deck to make them easy to find.

Pros:

• Easy to keep track of login credentials
• Work can’t really ‘go missing’ from account mix-ups
• No time spent signing in and out of separate accounts
• No risk of students accidentally saving to the wrong account
• You can sign in at any time to review, share, and delete student work
• Students can save their work as ‘private’ and you’ll still be able to view it

Cons:

• Students could inadvertently delete or edit other students’ decks
• Scrolling through everyone’s decks to find the one you’re looking for could be inconvenient

Maybe your students will be making too many decks for one account to sound appealing, but having separate accounts for each of your students sounds like a headache waiting to happen. In this case, we recommend taking advantage of a nifty little Gmail trick that not a lot of folks know about: the ability to create variants of your Gmail email address that all go to the same inbox.

With any email address at gmail.com, you can add a plus sign and more text after your username to create a variation that will still go to your inbox. Gmail ignores everything from the + forward, so the possibilities are endless.

You can set up one Gmail account (for example, ‘msbeifong@gmail.com’) and then use variants of it to set up separate Haiku Deck accounts for specific groupings of students, such as:

• msbeifong+history@gmail.com
• msbeifong+morningclass@gmail.com
• msbeifong+thirdgrade@gmail.com
• msbeifong+fourthgrade@gmail.com

This way, you only have one email address through Gmail – but you can have as many Haiku Deck accounts based on that email address as you’d like.

Pros:

• Easy to keep track of logins
• Easy to keep track of student work
• Low risk of work being saved to the wrong account
• You can sign in at any time to review, share, and delete student work
• Students can save their work as ‘private’ and you’ll still be able to view it
• Not as much time needed signing in and out of accounts on shared devices

Cons:

• Students signed into the same group could accidentally edit, or delete other students’ decks
• Even if they save decks as ‘private,’ any work students are doing can be viewed at any time by other users signed into the same account

If you’d prefer to keep all of your students’ decks separate, then you could have students set up accounts under their own school email addresses. From a support standpoint, we get the most troubleshooting emails from teachers with classrooms set up this way, due to the increased chances of work being saved improperly. If you decide to take this route, here are a few things to consider:

Pros:

• Students’ decks are saved separately
• Lower likelihood of students editing or deleting other students’ decks

Cons:

• The inconvenience of having to sign out/in on shared devices
• No access to decks until students share them with you
• Students cannot save decks as ‘private’ and share them with you
• High likelihood of decks being saved to the wrong accounts due to sign out/sign in confusion
• Higher likelihood of accounts being created improperly (misspelled email addresses, passwords, etc. or accidentally using a personal email address instead of an .edu one)
• Account mix-ups, improperly saved decks, etc. can be somewhat tricky and time-consuming to resolve for all parties involved in this case (less than ideal when you need a fast resolution)

For an easy alternative that still provides each of your students with a unique account, you could take advantage of using the Gmail trick mentioned above (under Method #2). For example, you could create the email address mrbarnesclass@gmail.com. For your students, you could create Haiku Deck accounts for them as follows:

• mrbarnesclass+jonny@gmail.com
• mrbarnesclass+sarah@gmail.com
• mrbarnesclass+alexi@gmail.com, etc.

All emails pertaining to any of the accounts created using this method will go to the original email address, mrbarnesclass@gmail.com. Here are the benefits of using Gmail instead of student email addresses:

• You can easily reset the password for any student account
• Students won’t receive emailed updates, news, etc. from us
• It’s super easy for us to look those kinds of accounts up to provide support
• We can get all of the accounts created for you – just email us at support@haikudeck.com
• If your students have educational email addresses that don’t accept incoming messages outside of the school district, this is a better method to use so that their passwords can be reset

In Summary

We recommend Haiku Deck Classroom for teachers using the app with their students. This provides the greatest convenience for the teacher and also provides important access to student presentation privacy features and download. We’re here to give you a hand and help out if you ever have any questions. Just drop us a line!

Just imagine how cool it would be if you could notate and mark up some content and use that in your Haiku Decks. It’d be pretty awesome, right? You could build recipes, create how-to guides with screen shots, point out things in photographs you’ve taken, and a billion other things. Good news is, you can do it for free with Skitch, and we’ll show you how!

The app: Skitch

Skitch is a free app by the folks who brought you Evernote. It’s straightforward, easy to use, and allows you to add shapes and text to images, then easily save your creations for use elsewhere.

The possibilities:

• Notate your slide backgrounds
• Blur portions of slide backgrounds
• Mark up photographs, screenshots, and anything else you want to use as a slide background

App mashup example:

Here’s an example deck that one of our talented education users put together to demonstrate how well Skitch and Haiku Deck can be used together in the classroom:

Skitch – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

How to use it with Haiku Deck:

1. Download Skitch on your Mac or PC.
2. Use the drop-down menu in the top center of Skitch to take a screenshot, snap a photograph, open a file, create a new blank document, and more.
3. Go nuts! Use the tools on the left to add text, shapes, tags, drawings, etc.
4. Drag the file icon on the bottom, center tab in the app to save your creation to whatever folder you drop it on (I like using my dekstop, personally).
5. Use your Skitched-up image as a slide background uploaded into either the Web App or the iPad app.

Tips:

• Try to be consistent in your color scheme if possible – it keeps your image from looking too busy and distracting
• Sign into Evernote in the top left corner of the app to save your Skitch work there
• Adjust how zoomed-in you are in the bottom left corner of the app
• Save your Skitch creations to a place like Google Drive or Dropbox so you can access them easily from your iPad
• If you need help with Skitch, check out their support site here.

Smile…it’s National Photography Month!

Photography makes us smile all year round — but for the occasion, we’ve collected 10 fun photography project ideas for exploring, teaching, and celebrating photography with Haiku Deck.

1. Do a Photography Scavenger Hunt

Hunt for, and photograph, a list of geometric shapes, colors, numbers, or textures. Snap photographs of things that start with a certain letter or rhyme with a word. Use Haiku Deck to share your photos and compare your discoveries!

Created with Haiku Deck, the free presentation app

2. Illustrate a Process

Take photographs to capture and share how to make something, do something, or carry out an experiment, step by step. Here’s a Haiku Deck that demonstrates how to make ice cream in a plastic bag! Continue reading