Fulton County Vanguard April 2021

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.

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.

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

We didn’t get to this, but check out how I used PowerPoint to make Mad Libs. Try the Teacher example or the Preposterous Paragraph example.

Play sound effects from your web browser with ClassTools Soundboard.