Hyperdocs
HyperDocs are interactive lesson plans that use Google Docs or Slides to provide access for students to all content and learning activities in one organized digital space. Instructional videos, templates, and samples are provided.
Virtual Icebreakers & Google Meet Games
Features an editable slide deck with yes/no, would you rather, and open-ended questions, and a list of ideas for Zoom/Google Meet games.
Bitmoji Virtual Classrooms
Learn how to use Google Slides to create a virtual bitmoji classroom. Includes a tutorial and slide deck with virtual furniture and backgrounds.
Templates for Organizing Weekly Content
This is a collection of Google Slides templates for organizing weekly lesson plans. Students click on the day of the week to see what’s in store.
Meet the Teacher Templates
This is a Google Slides template for introducing yourself to students. Topics include a quick hello, meet the teacher, 2 truths and a lie, my favorite things, books I love, and contact information.
Meet-the-Student Templates
Give your students a creative way to introduce themselves. Here you’ll find templates for virtual name tents, lockers, cubbies, bulletin boards, award shows, and more.
Distance Learning Expectations
There are 3 option in this post for communicating distance learning expectations: a Disney themed slideshow, a Google Meet landing page with countdown timer, and a SLANT for learning success handout.
Syllabus Templates
This is an editable Google Slides template for making a digital version of your syllabus, including navigation buttons so you can easily click back to the home page from any slide.
Article of the Week
Part of the reason students struggle with reading is because they lack prior knowledge and background. They can decode the words, but the words remain meaningless without a foundation of knowledge. To help build students’ prior knowledge, try assigning an Article of the Week…
E-Books
You’ve reached the end of a unit or year, and you want students to demonstrate their learning in a way that requires them to synthesize information, apply it in new ways, and reflect on how they have grown. To achieve any of these goals, an end-of-unit exam doesn’t quite cut it. Instead, have students create their own PDF e-books, packaging up some aspect of their learning into a finished digital product…
Curation Assignments
When it’s time to plan the learning experiences that would have our students operating on higher levels, some of us come up short. We may not have a huge arsenal of ready-to-use, high-level tasks to give our students. Instead, we often default to having students identify and define terms, label things, or answer basic recall questions. It’s what we know. And we have so much content to cover, many of us might feel that there really isn’t time for the higher-level stuff anyway. If this sounds anything like you, I have a suggestion: Try a curation assignment.
Note-Taking: Research Round-Up
We all have our own half-baked ideas about what makes one note-taking approach better than another, but if we’re going to call ourselves professionals, we need to know what the research says…
Brain Dumps: A Small Strategy with a Big Impact
Here’s a small strategy that makes a big impact on student learning – based on decades of cognitive science research. In scientific lingo, we call it “free recall.” Free recall is also known as a “brain dump,” “show what you know,” and a “stop and jot.” Here’s how it works…
Make It Stick: 4 Powerful Teaching Strategies Based on the Science of Learning
Over the past few decades, cognitive scientists have been trying to pinpoint exactly which activities work best for storing concepts in long-term memory. Until now we haven’t gone very deep into what these strategies look like in the classroom…
How to Build a Better Slideshow
Far too many PowerPoints and other slideshow presentations (by students AND teachers) are suffering from some very fixable problems. Here are six things you can do to make your slideshows better….
Tech Tools for Mind Mapping
Graphic organizers, or “mind maps,” make thinking visual, organizing concepts in a way that shows how they are related. The tools presented here make it possible to create these organizers, or mind maps, with text, images, videos, and links to outside sources, making them a rich multimedia experience. They also allow multiple users to work on the same map simultaneously, even from different locations.
10 Review Activities for Any Unit
It’s easy for review to get a little mundane, quickly going back over everything through a teacher-led Powerpoint or silent study with flashcards. But there are lots of other options. Here are ten easy ideas to get your students thinking back clearly and creatively…
Infographics Project
A good infographic can distill a concept so clearly. Take a hugely complex issue and boil it down to a beautiful display of the most important stats, facts, quotations, and images. Creating an infographic is the work of an artist, a writer, a researcher, and a critical thinker. It is an ideal medium for our students…
Discussion Warm-Ups
Most students just don’t respond well to walking into class and kicking off a discussion cold-turkey. When you ask a question first thing, silence and awkward eye contact avoidance is most likely all you will get…
Getting Started with Genius Hour
Do you find yourself searching for that one project that would truly engage your students? That would empower them to explore their passions? Do you sometimes feel that despite the many ways you are trying to creatively engage them, you just can’t reach everyone? Enter, genius hour. 20% time. Passion projects…