Creative Uses of Jamboard During COVID Times

Jamboard is quickly becoming a go to tool for the 2020 – 2021 school year. I know that I have written blog posts before on how we utilize the physical Jamboard Kiosks at our high school (can read more HERE). However, now that Jamboard can now be part of Google Meets, as well as teachers realizing they need a way for students to collaboratively work together in an efficient way online during remote blocks, they are finding ways to using the web version of Jamboard. While teachers are still finding it challenging to ‘read the room’ when they teach remotely, they like how Jamboard is helping tackle the collaborative aspect and getting student voices heard.

I have been impressed with how teachers at the high school have adapted their teaching with Jamboard. Below are are a couple of examples in different disciplines.

Math

Example 1: Mrs. D. Phillips and Mrs. Taylor were looking for a way to mimic an activity that they have had students do on big poster paper around the classroom with properities of angles in Geometry class. They decided that Jamboard would be their solution to getting students to working collaboratively during their remote teaching block. Each pair received their own copy of the Jamboard file.

How was this created? The two teachers took screenshots of the the diagram as well as the angle information. They then created multiple stickies to match the angle names. Once each pair receives their copy, they have the ability to move the stickies to the appropriate spots. To see what this looks like in Jamboard, click HERE.

Example 2: Have open office hours for students to join you in a Google Meet? How about sharing out a whiteboard (Jamboard file) where you could have different students working on different problems on different pages. This way both teacher & student can see what each other is doing. No need to take picture of handwritten work. Thanks Mr. Greiner for the idea!

Humanities

Example 1: Mrs. Nichol’s from the IB History team came up with a wrap up activity relating to Italy in the 1920’s and 1930’s. She created a timeline where she asked each group to rate activities based on “least successful to most successful” while paying attention to the year along the x axis. Check out the gif below to see how students could interact with the Jamboard file. To see what this look, click HERE

How can you create something similar? Mrs. Nichols created two text boxes on the top for the title and directions. She then used the shape feature to create two rectangular boxes. To label the axes, four different text boxes were created. Lastly, she took several screen shots of the events from a file that she already had. Then, inserted each screenshot as an image and layered them on top of each other. Once she was happy with the page, she then duplicated this 7 more times so that all eight groups would work on the same Jamboard file, just on a different page.

Example 2: Mrs. Nichols also created a similar timeline activity. Again, each group worked on their particular page of the Jam file. This time, there is only one axis where students dragged the rectangles based on “Most significant to Least significant”. Click HERE to see a copy of this activity. Pro Tip: If students indicated they have a hard time reading the text in an image, they can enlarge the image and the shrink it back down to the initial size.

Example 3: Mrs. O’Connor wanted a way for students to annotate different cartoons on their own. She used the feature, make a copy for each student in google classroom as she didn’t want student to work collaboratively. In the Jam file, she included 13 different cartoons, one on each page. Students had the freedom to pick seven of the 13. She was asking them to find the message that the author was making. She provided an example of how they could annotate a cartoon to help give context to what she was looking for. I thought this was a clever way of having students annotate without having physical paper in front of them. Click HERE to view this in Jamboard. Below are some of the pages in the file.

Example 4: Mrs. O’Connell needed a way where students both at home and at school could mimic an activity that is done traditionally on big poster paper. Students would ‘argue’ with one another to fight over land in Africa – activity called “Scramble over Africa”. Seeing as though students would not be able to share markers and lean over each other over poster paper, she decided to use Jamboard to help digitize the activity. She pulled up the map of Africa on the Jam. Then students were able to use the pen/highlighter feature to mark territories and annotate over the country. I liked how a key was provided so that students had a clear way of knowing who was wanting what part of the country. While the teachers missed the actual physical activity, they appreciated being able to replicate as best as they could.

How was this created? Mrs. O’Connell inserted an image and made it the full size of the Jam page (you currently are not allowed to insert an image as a background).

Wellness

Example 1: The Wellness department (Mr. Johansmeyer, Mr. Guerard, Mr. Pion) has really had to think things through during COVID time. On day one, to get all student voices heard, the Wellness 1 teachers had each student add one sticky to each page of the jam file. A sample of what page one looked like can be seen below. On the first page, students listed 5 examples of Physical wellness in their life. This then started a whole class conversation. Students completed similar tasks relating to emotional, social, intellectual and spiritual wellness on the remaining four pages. In this case, one file was shared with the whole class in google classroom with the setting “anyone with the link can edit”. There was not much that needed to be added to the page prior to students working on it other than adding the big sticky in the middle providing the instruction.

Any Discipline

Example 1: This was shared with me from Mary Marotta. She shared a “Rose, Thorn, Bud” activity, an idea she got from the Mindful Schools. Basically, students select a sticky and add information under one of columns. A pro tip: If you are wanting to know who said way, ask students to include their first name in the sticky. To see what this looks like in Jamboard, click HERE

As you can see there are many ways that Jamboard can be used in the classroom. You don’t need the physical Jamboard Kisok to complete collaborative activities. These examples are evidence of the hard work that teachers are putting in daily to rethink and adapt lessons during in person and remote lessons. Well done! I look forward to seeing what other ways teachers take it from here.

If you would like to talk more about how Jamboard can be used in your curriculum, you know where to find me.

And that is my Spiel…