Buncee Blog

As a Special Education Teacher for nearly 20 years, I have have seen many things come and go…teaching technology to students with special needs means many of those things have been apps, programs, and websites. Something I have been lucky to find is Buncee!  When all your students ask to use something specific to show their knowledge about a topic or to complete a special project – you tend to stick with it! Buncee works from a browser or via the app on the iPad minis that I push around in my cart from class to class. Students with autism love choosing items when given a little keyword help. Other students love animations of the dance moves and other videos. In this brief blog post, I would like to acquaint you with a few of my most successful Buncee projects.

All About Me:
“All About Me” is a common topic to incorporate at the beginning of the school year to get to know your new students. A search on Pinterest has numerous ideas and books that can be made etc. With Buncee, I designed a template for my autistic students to use to tell me more about themselves, their likes and dislikes. They just needed to circle the option of their choice! Some of my smarter students even figured out that they could delete the options that did not apply to them, leaving only stuff that was about them specifically! This was one of our very first projects ever – so I tried to keep things simple. 

 

Holiday Cards:
Another popular thing for teachers to have students make are greeting cards for various holidays. Students make cards for family, friends and various school staff. There is no better venue for making cards than Buncee! I would make a model for them to follow in terms of format and show them many options that were available in terms of pictures, sayings, animations etc. One year, our school copier was on the fritz, so we were unable to print out the student’s creations. My workaround was to have students hand write the link to their online cards onto handmade gift tags – it was a real hit with the families!

 

App-Smashing:
When you want students to show you what they have learned, Buncee is my go-to app of choice! I often “app-smash” or use Buncee with other apps or websites. Recently, I had my students watch a current event video on Flocabulary. Then, they were asked to portray and label/explain one thing they learned about from the video. Of course, they asked to use their favorite presentation app, Buncee to show what they know! I was pleasantly surprised with their results! 

 

How-To Use Buncee: 
Another project that was interesting was when I had a class of my older students make a “How to Buncee” Buncee! They used screenshots from using the app and showed the many options and choices for making a presentation. This “expert” class then shared their projects with a younger class that was new to using Buncee.  It was a win-win lesson for both classes!

 

Lesson Planning:
I use Buncee as a teacher to present my lessons to students. I often use books read aloud on video (via Youtube, TeacherTube or Vimeo) to introduce a theme or topic. And I have websites that I regularly utilize like GoNoodle, Nearpod, Boardmaker, and Classkick. These all display nicely within a Buncee presentation. And all my links are together where and when I need them!

 

How-To Use Apps/Sites :
Another thing I often do with Buncee is making “ How To ” presentations that explain to students how to navigate to other apps or sites I use. Buncee is perfect for this with its ability to draw and type on top of your photos or screenshots. Check out this link for an example of how I showed my students to use Typing.

 

Buncee is a great and powerful tool that the students (and this teacher!) really enjoy using! I’m sure once you give it a try that you will make it part of your classroom toolbox for any creative endeavor!

 

Jean Capuano works at P811M in District 75 located in New York City. She is a Special Education Teacher to students with Autism and other special needs. She is a technology lover, slave to her tuxedo kitty, wife, mom to a 22-year-old son and an avid Pokemon Go Player. Follow her on @JeanCapuano.