5 simple Jamboard lessons (great for remote learning!)

hi friends my name is john and i'd like to introduce you to five simple jamboard activities that work with any grade level or subject area these activities are a lot of fun and will encourage creativity critical thinking and problem solving in your students each of these activities will work in a remote environment if you're teaching virtually or face to face if you're physically with your students we're going to kick things off with sticky graph and line attack these are two great whole class activities line attack is really good for math classrooms followed by brain dump which is a good whole class review i usually do brain dump right before a unit test chapter test or assessment then we'll wrap things up with two small group activities annotation station and sorting wall now before you attempt these activities in your classroom it's important that you have a good understanding of how jamboard works and the tools that are available inside of jamboard check the description for this video for an introduction to jamboard video that i created for each of these activities i'm going to provide you with a classroom template that you can take and make a copy of and use in your own classroom check the description for this video for all of those links as well all right that's the introduction let's get started with idea number one sticky graph sticky graph is a simple activity that works very well if you have non-touch devices now jamboard was designed for touch screens where you can sketch drawn doodle but if you don't have touch screens if you have mac pc or non-touch chromebooks it's kind of frustrating this activity works really well all you need to do is create a jam file and provide your students with a series of options along the bottom of the frame so this is the template you can get this template by heading over to the video description here is an example that i set up for an elementary classroom we have pets i've used images for this one students are simply going to use the sticky note tool to write their name and then place that sticky note above whichever option applies to them so in my case we do have a rabbit and i also have a dog so i put one in both of those the end result will look something like this it's kind of a very informal messy bar graph but it's just a fun way to have a conversation and discussion now a different idea for this this works well in the middle and high school grades is to do a process graph so let's say that you're working on a big project research paper website video and you want to just see informally what percentage of that project is complete so i've given my students a series of percentages from 10 to 100 percent they're gonna add their sticky note to the you know estimate of where they're at and the end result might look something like this now hopefully you have a general idea of where they should be and you can look at this and say oh matt boy he's gonna be done way early but you know janelle john and james man they really need to get moving so this can provide you with some helpful information you can even have students move their sticky note every day or throughout the class period as they begin moving through their project this is a simple activity for the whole class works great with non-touch this is sticky graph activity number two is called line attack this one is a lot of fun this works great with a whole class the more the better because what students are going to do is they're going to be drawing lines between objects you're going to give them something like this we have options on one side options on the other side and students are going to connect the lines together the more lines that connect to objects the greater the consensus from the group that that is true unless we've got a couple of examples now i taught high school biology so i might set something up like this we have a list of parts of the cell on either side and then in the middle we have animal and plant and i want students to identify which parts of the cell belong to an animal cell which part belongs to a plant cell so we're just going to use the drawing tool you know every kid can pick a different color you know the more colorful the better so you know nucleus is in the animal and the plant golgi is in both there we go mitochondria is actually in both chloroplasts only implant so you just go through here and you start making those lines now it's going to be kind of messy but that's the point the more lines the greater the consensus you're going to end up with something that might look like this so here's for language arts we have the greek and roman gods and students will identify which group they belong to you could do it that way this also works very well for math you can use the graph option for jamboard create a graph give students an equation and then have them roughly estimate the slope of that line obviously the more lines that kind of collect around an area indicates a greater consensus about the answer for that type of solution this activity works great in a whole class environment works wonderful with touch or non-touch devices it's pretty easy to just draw a line between two objects with the track pad so a touch screen isn't necessary for this it's a lot of fun this is number two line attack activity number three is called brain dump this activity works really well at the end of a major unit right before a test or assessment students are going to share everything they can remember about the major objectives that we have learned now i will go in and set up a jam file with one frame for each of our major learning topics you can have up to 20 frames in a jam activity so this one is on the greek gods and on each frame i have added a picture of one of the greek gods and students will begin adding sticky notes with all the different things facts that they can remember they'll put everything they can remember about aries on this page and when they run out they can't think of anything else they can go on to the next page and we'll talk about poseidon we'll just keep adding those sticky notes and eventually it'll kind of look like this the more the better once i've given my students 10 15 minutes to do the brain dump we'll go through each of the frames together and we'll begin sorting the sticky notes we'll take out any that you know were inaccurate or not important we'll kind of combine some that are related to another and i'll just kind of use this as an opportunity to review the important things that they need to remember if i have a touch screen i'll go ahead and sketch and draw and circle and highlight on top of this again emphasize the important things that they need to know once we've completed this activity there's a cool thing you can do i'm going to go up to the very top of my jam file click the three dots and you'll see that you have the option to download this entire jam activity as a pdf i'll then assign that through google classroom and students can use this to review prior to the test or assessment that is upcoming lesson idea number four is called annotation station now this idea works best in either a small group setting three to five students or individually the previous three ideas work really well as whole class projects this one won't work great if you've got 20 30 kids working simultaneously now for annotation station you are going to provide your students with some type of image they're going to be looking at something and then they're going to be annotating over top of that image this works very well for art music science social studies anything that has a rich visual object library that you can draw from in this case i've got a painting by claude monet and i'm asking students to highlight and identify some of the key characteristics of his style of painting i could also provide my students with a historical image like this one of greek culture and ask students to identify you know key contributions of greek culture embedded inside of this image this works very well for social studies we have a map i might have my students identify the northern and southern states in the civil war period or identify the major conflicts that took place in world war ii as a former science teacher myself i used to do this all the time on paper here's a plant cell i would have my students identify the major organelles inside of this diagram if all else fails and you run out of time you have nothing better to do you can always challenge your students to find waldo in one of these great scene eye pictures that's idea number four annotation station the final activity i have for you is called sorting wall now like annotation station sorting wall works best if you assign this to small groups of three to five students or ask each student to do their own individual activity now the example that we're looking at here is romeo and juliet sorting wall works best when you have a large body of complex interrelated ideas in this case we have all the different characters of romeo and juliet and there's so many relationships and feuds and backstory going on here it's very complex for students to you know follow all of it so i've provided my student with a list of all of those characters their task is to sort them to arrange them to make sense of all of this information now give your students free rein to do that however they want they can draw they can recolor do whatever they want the end result might look something like this this is my example so you can see i've got the capulets in green and the montagues and yellow we've got relationship lines between them this allows students to begin conceptualizing how some of these ideas are connected together this activity sorting wall works very well for social studies literature science again anything with a large body of interrelated ideas i hope you found these five jamboard lessons helpful and inspiring check the description for this video to get templates for each of the five activities that i've described before you head out check out the jamboard playlist that's coming up next that includes more tips and ideas for using jamboard in your classroom you

Channel: John R. Sowash

Views: 15,882

Keywords: Teaching, Education, EdTech, Educational Technology

Id: Mj0HRU1AdEY

Length: 11min 21sec (681 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 27 2020