Well the semester has somehow already come to an end so I guess it is time to share what I have been working on! The details about my project are in the video at the end of this post, however I wanted to share a few links and additional insights that aren’t included in the video in this post.
I started off with just a few loose ideas about what I wanted to do and wrote a few fairly general blog posts about it here and here. The only thing I was really sure of for my project is that I wanted to work with students on some new technology platforms while also learning how to use them myself. Things evolved slightly and I ended up creating two parts to my project – one being an ongoing project based around #BookTok that I worked on with my ELA A10 class, and the other focussing on learning various Google tools.
#BookTok & Canva
I discovered #BookTok early on in the semester and after stumbling upon this article online I decided to give it a go. I’ll show you this document in my video and explain the way we used it, but this is what I made available to students as they worked through the process of choosing their novels. Overall I enjoyed using BookTok, though I had some slightly unexpected results in that students generally preferred Goodreads. Another unexpected result is that spending more time on TikTok (and Cymone‘s Summary of Learning!) inspired me to try making a few of my own for my video… It’s a little embrassing, but a lot of fun!
As far as my student project, I decided to go with Canva Video, and I loved using this! I spent a lot of time demonstrating this tool for my students, but I did also give them this checklist to help them with our specific purpose of creating a book review. Students had a lot of fun with it and I ended up using it to make my final project as well. I probably should have chosen something else since I used it to create my Summary of Learning… but there was still so much I wanted to try out with it! So instead of moving to a new tool, I made the choice to stick with Canva and hone my skills. I also purposefully made this video much different than my first.
Google Tools
Slides
The first tool I looked at was Slides. In my video, I discussed finding game templates online. Although I only used one template from online and another shared by a friend, I found some great websites that have promising games on them. Check out the resources on We Are Teachers (where I found my Jeoparty template), Ditch That Textbook, and SlidesMania if you want to spice up your classroom too!
Forms
I started with this website to help me set up my multiple choice assessment on Google Forms. I appreciated the screenshots to go with the instructions, and although it’s nice to watch videos for tutorials I actually liked that I didn’t have to constantly pause a video to work back and forth for this particular tool. I came across this website after I had created my form already and bookmarked it for future use.
Jamboard
I stuck with the basics of this tool and didn’t branch very far for my first few times using it but I was actually inspired to use Jamboard from one of Patricia‘s retweets sharing this document link that has a gazillion templates for all subject areas and grades that you can use. Although I had some mixed feelings about Jamboard after using it, I think I would like to try using it again after looking more closely at some of these templates. There are some really creative ideas that I think students would enjoy!
Earth
Oh boy, this was a tough one for me! I used this short YouTube tutorial to help me get started, and making the project was simple enough but as you’ll see in the video, I had some computer issues with this tool which made me a little frustrated and kind of stop exploring how to use it unfortunately. This tool deserves a bit more time to get to know it though, because I think there is a lot of potential here!
Major Project
So now that you have read about all the resources and checked out some links, here it is! The explanation of my final project! Enjoy! (Also, Dylan – check out the length!)