Easel.ly

Product Description:

Easel.ly is an online program where you can make “presentations.” These presentations are more like digital posters you or your students can make.  https://www.easel.ly/

Glitchy Review:

After playing around with Easel.ly I was able to see the benefit of the program for teachers and students alike. For example, AVID schools this is great to create different types of one pagers or notes pages for students. However there were some reservations I had about the program.

First, the program is difficult to use and understand, so if you are a teacher with not so good technology skills STEER CLEAR of Easel.ly. As an experienced technology user I struggled with the program. With that being said I did have a couple of my students work on Easel.ly to see if they could do it. I did not give them directions, videos, or anything beyond what I wanted them to make. Here are the results: (left picture is start, right is after 1 hour.)

Student A start 

Student A after 1 hour

Student B before

Student B after 1 hour

As you can see the students were able to get something but the amount of time they need to acclimate to the program as well as learn how to do the different things was very time consuming. This is what they were able to do in 1 hour. While I am able to see the benefits of this program the amount of work which needs to go into it is not conducive to a classroom. For teachers it does offer them the ability to make unique posters for their classroom, you still run into the issue of printing them. When I asked the students what they thought of the program both stated it was "kinda easy to figure out, but it was still hard to use." Might I make a note that the students I gave this too are my "technology proficient" students in my class. I can only imagine how confused my other students would have been. This is the other factor to think about when using this program; each student's exposure and experience with technology.

Second, this program does not allow for the teacher to add students to their class. Each student will have to individually sign-up for the program. As a teacher this is difficult because while my district has Google accounts for all students, most do not. This begs the question of how should the students sign up?

Overall, this program has a great start for teachers, but after seeing everything it really is best for businesses. This program has not adapted enough to allow teachers to really use this in their classroom.

User Rating:

This program is a solid level 3 with even some of the most experienced users having issues the first couple of times out. This is not to say you couldn’t figure it out; it would just take you some time to do that. Let’s face it as teachers we do not have a lot of time left for things like this.

Glitchy Rating:

I would give this program a 2 because of the difficulty in use as well as the lack of real use for a teacher.