Having students make name tents on the first day of school is a popular strategy for getting to know your students and starting to build community in their small groups. If you’re in a distance learning model, you can do almost the exact same thing. Just set up the project as a Google Slide. 

Say hello on day one and share the Google Slides with the instructions and templates to each student at home. Show them a model you’ve made as an example. Have them fill out their templates in Google Slides, then screenshot (or save as a PNG or JPG) their name card. Finally, have them drop a selfie and their name card into a collaborative Google slide presentation for the class.

By the end, you and everyone else will be able to see each student with their name card in the slide, and you can all start to get to know each other. You’ll be able to match names to faces from the get-go, and be far more prepared for a return to school whenever that may come.

If you’d like to purchase pre-made instructions and templates for this activity from Spark Creativity, you can find it here. Otherwise, you are welcome to use the template posted below.