Making Thinking Visible with #HistorySnaps!

About a year ago, I read a Twitter post from Tara Martin (@TaraMartineEDU) about using #BookSnaps as a learning strategy in the classroom. She also has a website with some AMAZING resources about this activity, including How-To-Videos and examples of how to create #BookSnaps using different digital tools.

Because I teach Science and Social Studies, I typically use this strategy with news articles and we call them #ScienceSnaps and #HistorySnaps, depending on the topic.

For the lesson below, students chose a Native American region to research. I used articles from Newsela to put together a text set for students to utilize in their research. They used the article to create #HistorySnaps to create a visual representation of their thinking about the text and share that thinking with their classmates.

Here are the directions I gave students:

Here are some student examples:

Have you tried using #BookSnaps in your classroom? I would love to hear about your experience!

Comments

Awesome Projects for January!

This week has been super busy! But it's that awesome kind of busy where I am working on multiple projects for January that I am SUPER excited about! Kinders on Chromebooks We are preparing for our 3rd Quarter EdTech session, and we are planning to include resources specifically designed for our K-2 teachers. We want to create videos in which we model strategies that K-2 teachers can use to help their students learn how to login to Chromebooks. My EdTech teammate reached out to the Kindergarten team at one of our schools, and they were kind enough to open their doors to us! We will be working with this team on the first day back from Winter Break in January. Our plan is for me to lead the first session while another EdTech team member records the lesson and assists students as needed. We will be sharing the video footage, along with other K-2 resources, with our teachers during our sessions throughout the 3rd Quarter. This week I am trying to build a Google Site th

Create an Instagram Story!

One day on Twitter, I came across a tweet from Ryan O'Donnell ( @creativeedtech ) in which he shared a Facebook template that could be used for students to demonstrate their learning. I clicked on the link to his website , and I was AMAZED at all the cool templates he had created for teachers to use for free! I decided to try using an Instagram template during a unit on the planets in our solar system. I wanted students to demonstrate what they learned about the different planets, but I wanted them to do it in a creative way. Here are the directions I gave to my students: Here are some student examples: Student Example #1 Student Example #2 Student Example #3 Student Example #4 I really enjoyed this activity, and I love how students familiar with hashtags were able to create and use them in clever ways! If I was to go back and do this again, I would spend some time working with students less familiar with social media and hashtags and give them some more

Creating PD Choice Boards!

As the new EdTech and Social Studies Specialist, part of my job includes planning and facilitating professional development for our social studies teachers. Our main PD sessions take place once a month on Wednesdays when teachers are released early from their school sites. Leading these PD sessions was a part of the job that I was SUPER excited about when I first started. However, there are some challenges that I wasn't prepared for that have caused me to reflect and rethink the way I have been planning. Challenges 1) We have 32 schools in our district, and there are three different release times. To honor everyone's time and make sure teachers don't have to work outside of contract hours, we decided to have two different sessions with a half-hour of overlap time. I set up the activities in Google Classroom, number them, and include videos and directions so that teachers can work through them at their own pace when they arrive. However, some teachers have a d

Roxi Thompson

Search This Blog