Killeen Independent School District • July 2022

Turn a potentially boring lesson into a brilliant one! Make learning irresistible by hooking your students' senses, connecting to background knowledge, making predictions, and building mysteries. Check out pixelated pictures, redacted text, locked content, customized Mad Libs, emoji messages, and other inviting ways to captivate learners.

👋😁 Enter text into emojitranslate.com. It replaces some words with pictures. You can copy the “emojified” text and paste it anywhere. This is handy for spicing up instructions, playing with language, making announcements, telling a story, and getting a laugh.

Call up an emoji picker on a PC by holding down the Windows Key + the period key.

There is not an emoji for everything, so symbolically representing vocabulary or concepts can be a stretch. It can take a while to figure out how to clearly show a vocabulary term with emojis, which is why symbolically representing vocabulary can be an interesting learning activity.

Encourage brainstorming by playing Magic Word. Before having small groups or individuals brainstorm a list of words or phrases, write one word or phrase on a piece of paper. Fold it up and put it in your pocket or place it somewhere special (like in a hat). Groups or individuals work to write down as many words or phrases as possible. After time is up, the class discusses their brainstorms. Finally, reveal the magic word. Offer a reward for the groups that have the magic word written on their lists.

Hot Tip: Have groups record their ideas into a Microsoft Form (you can duplicate my template) and submit when the timer goes off. That way students don’t try to cheat by adding to their list. After brainstorming time is up, you can copy the brainstormed items from the Excel spreadsheet and paste into WordSift.org to visualize the frequency of words.

Enter items on a wheel and spin at wheelofnames.com.

Markup a text in a document or in a screenshot to obscure key words. Do this by adding black highlighting, shapes, or scribbles. As students predict each word, remove the highlighting, shapes, or scribbles to reveal the word. This works best when mirroring your computer or tablet on a big screen. Blackout activities can lead to great discussions. Use Blackout to preview upcoming content and to review content we’ve already learned.

Tease a lesson by showing students a pixelated picture from that upcoming lesson. Students enjoy making observations and guesses about the picture. When the real picture is revealed, students feel a connection the photo, diagram, map—or whatever the picture is that they were focused on. You can upload and pixelate an image at lunapic.com.

The Most Dangerous Writing App is a website that encourages you to keep writing, no matter what. If you pause too long in your typing, all of your progress is lost and you have to start over. Yikes! You can students challenge to do “brain dump” before or after a lesson. If students is successful, he or she can copy the writing and paste it into something like Padlet, Google Classroom, Google Docs, or an email.

Students can get inspiration for a story from Emoji Prompts. Go to byrdseed.com/emoji2 and you’ll see one randomly selected emoji on the screen. Students can use this to jumpstart a creative story. They can continue getting ideas for their stories by clicking the “And then…” button. Each time that button is clicked another randomly selected emoji is added in sequence. Students can get ideas from Emoji Prompts and then write on paper, orally tell a story, type into a Google Doc, record into an app, add to a prewriting organizer, etc.

Read the article about hooking students with questions. This is the article that mentions the brilliant term, “neurological hack.”

Check out how I used PowerPoint to make Mad Libs. Try the Teacher example or the Preposterous Paragraph example.

Have fun with your photos with PhotoFunia.com! Upload an image and insert it into various pictures.

Play sound effects from your web browser with ClassTools Soundboard.