Roxi Thompson

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...

One of my favorite ways to use Google Slides in the classroom is to have students create collaborative slide decks together. I originally learned about this idea from Alice Keeler ( @alicekeeler ) in one of her "Go Slow" classes. She  also wrote a blog post earlier this year about using Google Slides to create Frayer Model templates. I took her idea and changed it up in order to use it for a geography activity.  I created an assignment with the directions and the Google Slide decks (one deck for each rotation): Here are the directions I added to the assignment: I used the grid view in Google Slides to watch as students started adding to the slide deck. My students have really improved in their ability to work collaboratively within a single slide deck. The first time we did this there were some students who were messing with other students' slides or changing the backgrounds for all the slides instead of just their own. I try to treat each of th...

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: Student Example #1 Student Example #2 Student Example #3 Student Example #4 ...