Four Ways Students Can Create Masterpieces Right Now

by Mike Neumire, published on 9/1/2022

Video tutorials, vlogs, or podcasts

WeVideo provides students the tools to capture and edit video and audio for a variety of purposes.

1. 1. If students are learning a new process, they might encapsulate the necessary steps in the form of a tutorial video.

   2. If students are relying on discussion to parse through the complexity of a topic or debate, they might record the back and forth in the form of a podcast.

   3. In order to prepare themselves for a coming lesson, students might be assigned a vocabulary term about which they make an instructional video.

WeVideo is web-based and provides students with tons of stock materials, removing most of the tedious work of making videos. Students can spend lots of time on highly detailed, custom video, or grab a few quick stock images, video clips, and songs to pair with their recorded video script.

Digital escape rooms with Google Forms and Google Sites

Escape rooms- both digital and physical- rely on mystery and open loops to pull participants into the experience. Once engaged, they tap into and sharpen their critical thinking, creativity, communication, and collaboration skills. Creating an escape room requires all that and so much more.

1. 1. At the end of a unit, each class can create a digital escape room based on the content and skills covered to test on other classes. These digital creations could be saved and used in future classes.

   2. In order to jigsaw content, groups could first be responsible for creating one digital clue based on their piece of the lesson, and then new groups could take each clue created to make one digital escape room.

   3. Each week, a student or group could be in charge of developing a classroom clue that any other student could try to solve at any point throughout the week, as an added challenge.

Google Forms and Google Sites pair together perfectly for digital escape room construction. Google Forms provide conditional formatting options that can be used to act as locks, meaning participants would have to provide correct responses to get beyond each question field. They also provide branching options, meaning participants could be taken to different landing spots depending on their answer. Google Sites is a great place to embed these forms, along with the content that will serve as clues to escape. As a little mystery bonus, you can set up subpages of your site to be hidden so that participants would have to discover the URL somehow.

Simulations and games on Minecraft and Scratch

One of the unfortunate realities of student creations is that they often have a short shelf life and an audience of one. If a student works really hard to make something awesome, only for it to be graded by the teacher and then set aside, that student’s motivation will take a hit. Interactives, simulations and games are excellent projects because they can serve a purpose beyond demonstrating what the student has learned. They can be incorporated into instruction and make a lesson that much richer for other students.

Two powerful digital platforms that support this type of creativity are Minecraft and Scratch. These platforms stand out because they offer such open-ended opportunities, that a student can really use the tools to build what they’re imagining. They also can be scaled to the scope of the project- if you need students to whip something up in a class period, they can make something quickly on these platforms that still packs a punch. If you have time to dedicate to making authentic learning artifacts, they can be fleshed out with detail that shows the depth of their learning.

Minecraft ideas include simulating a pivotal scene from a book with a few key differences (ELA), what-would-you-do scenarios (SEL), a who’s who guessing game full of characters that students have to identify from the details they share in dialogue (social studies), using XY coordinates to map and graph an area (math), and much, much more.

Scratch ideas include real life applications of many math concepts including variables, arrays, computation, graphing, and much more. Interactive scenes with characters or historical figures can also be coded to do different things depending on player choices. Another great application of this platform in any subject area is to create interactive vocabulary- give students vocabulary terms and ask them to bring them to life using Scratch. Then those vocabulary terms can be reinforced using a jigsaw method where all students get to interact with all the terms on Scratch.

Books on Book Creator

Book Creator makes it easy for students to structure and display their learning in the familiar format of a digital book. The process of making a book on Book Creator is similar to creating a slidedeck on Google Slides or Powerpoint, but packages the creation to live and breathe like a digital book. It comes with tons of great templates and tools that guide the construction of each page, accessibility features that make consuming the book equitable to all readers, and flexible sharing options to ensure that your audience goes beyond the teacher and the gradebook. Here are some ideas for empowering student creators in the classroom with Book Creator:

1. 1. Use Book Creator to encapsulate the school year. In the beginning of the year, as a way of teaching students how to use the platform itself, have them create the first half of a book for themselves- full of questions they have about this year and goals they intend to set for themselves (be sure to provide lots of examples). Once students have filled a library with these unfinished books, hide that library so that it is out of student minds until the end of the year. Then when the school year is drawing to a close, bring that library back to students and have them reflect on the goals they set, answer the questions they asked, etc. Be sure to also have them provide advice for incoming students, and these will serve as the models for next year’s students.

   2. A simple, non-academic use of Book Creator is to not make books at all, but instead, cards. Have students make each other birthday cards as a regular practice to develop relationships and meet SEL standards.

   3. Have a running book that students use as a journal space to document their learning each step of the way, replete with screenshots, audio recordings, etc.

   4. Create a shared book between students and have each of them contribute a few pages on an assigned vocabulary word. When each student is done with their assigned word, the group has created and published a reference guide for a lesson.

When students are trusted and empowered to create artifacts out of their learning, the knowledge and skills they acquired are much more deeply entrenched than if they were to just take a quiz and move onto the next topic. That is truer still if they have an opportunity to create something relevant and connect it to an audience outside their classroom. Student creation requires investments: time, supplies, and planning, which can make it easy to cut out of the curriculum. However the return on investment makes student creation an essential part of a student’s learning journey.

<a href="https://www.flaticon.com/free-icons/creativity" title="creativity icons">Creativity icons created by Afian Rochmah Afif - Flaticon</a>