Project Showcase #5 – Using @Buncee for Megacities Project #sschat

I tried using Buncee with my 9th grade Human Geography teachers in an end-of-year “Megacities” project. The reasons for choosing Buncee were:

1. students can do a voiceover by simply pressing the record button on their laptop
2. students can easily add images, which was a focus of this presentation
3. students can easily embed video in their projects
4. all projects come into a teacher dashboard for easy viewing and grading
5. we thought that Buncee would be very easy for students to use (and this was definitely the case)

We wanted to be careful to keep the focus on the learning task at hand, and not the presentation tool, so Buncee’s ease of use was very helpful in achieving this goal. Students were asked to either “showcase” their megacity or create a PSA for their megacity.

In the first example above, the student chose to highlight Rio de Janeiro. She was able to easily import traditional samba music into a slide highlighting culture. The animations she chose helped her capture the festive feel she was looking to highlight. One of the best things about using Buncee was how simple it is to create a voiceover. You can record audio into a buncee from your laptop microphone, so no importing / exporting of audio files required.

I must also say that Buncee has some awesomely helpful people on their team! I had a couple of questions (ie: their embed code was not working with Weebly), and not only did they respond right away and have a solution for my problem, they also went above and beyond in terms of being helpful and suggesting ideas / requesting feedback to help them continue to build a great project for educators.

I do wish that there was an auto-play option in Buncee, versus having to manually click through the slides and press the mic button to hear the audio. As well, I wanted more sharing options for students when they had completed their project, but I understand this is something the Buncee team is already working on.

Buncee was so easy for the students to use, and really helps to keep the focus on the learning task versus the tech tool. I’m actually eager to try using Buncee with my foreign language teachers, because I think this would have a lot of potential in their classes.