Guest Blog Lucie deLaBruere: Expanding Collaborative Possibilities

Lucie deLaBruere spent 30 years in Vermont schools teaching and learning with students from kindergarten to graduate school. For more than 20 years, she filled her classrooms with project-based learning opportunities that were hands-on, minds-on and integrated within both local and global communities. Her students’ portfolios documented proficiencies in college and career readiness skills ranging from leadership and communication to more technical skills. Lucie is known for her passion and success in engaging female students, designing TechSavvy Girls programming that has increased the number of girls receiving technical education and getting career opportunities.
Lucie is an incredible resource in the WeVideo community, so we invited her to share one of her favorite WeVideo techniques.
Experienced WeVideo users know about WeVideo’s rich collaboratives feature for projects centered on video assets.  But, when I discovered that WeVideo can also import a PDF, and do so in an interesting way, it opened up all kinds of new ways to create movies, including using Google Slides’ export-to-PDF feature.
This method works great for quick and easy photo slideshow videos.  It is very handy for teachers who work with younger learners.  Imagine your young authors turning stories they create in Google Slides into a narrated movie. Or how about having a teacher turn a collection of student work into a quick movie?
This simple yet collaborative method of creating classroom movies has wide-ranging uses in upper grades, as well:

• In a math class, a teacher could ask students to find examples of a certain geometric pattern at play in the real world
• In a social studies class, a teacher could ask students to find an example of culture being promoted in social media or news media and take a screenshot or photo of the article or artifact
• In science class, a teacher could ask students to add a photo as data from a lab and the differences in the photos could communicate shared data
• In language arts, students could write a six word story and add an image to illustrate
• ESL students could each contribute an image from their cultural custom of a holiday

WeVideo makes it easy to add sound and music to the collaborative still image slide deck, making the project come alive. The final product offers an engagement opportunity among the students, as well with as an authentic audience outside the classroom.
So what happens when you mix the collaborative power of Google Slides with the creative power of WeVideo? You get the easiest, fastest way to make a collaborative movie. Once you try it, you’ll find endless uses for this technique. To prove it, I recently challenged other educators around Vermont to share what types of robots they were planning to use for the Hour of Code event during Computer Science Week by adding a slide to this Google Slide deck.   In the first 24 hours, 24 schools introduced us to their robots.  
In just minutes, I was then able to use Google’s download as PDF feature and WeVideo’s ability to import PDFs as media to create this FUN movie!  To make your own video, go ahead and follow these steps in my Google Slides and WeVideo mashup tutorial.