Below you will find our group's write-up, and above the link for the Open License information.
We have chosen this topic because we all previously worked on topics that connect to this topic in one regard or another (Michael and Taha did their Challenge B on understanding the mind, Michael’s Challenge A was on the importance of exercise, Kate did her Challenge B on Mindful Moments). Combining these ideas together, we aim to create an OER that can be used by both teachers and learners to the concept of “mindful moments” which we would describe as being very short little movement breaks throughout the day that can help to shift our attention, regulate our emotions and ease the mind.
Many educators struggle with the misconception that mindfulness can simply be added into the school day and immediately take effect. In reality, its impact depends heavily on how, when, and why it is used, which can feel overwhelming for teachers already short on time. The challenge is that many educators lack accessible guidance on weaving mindfulness into daily routines in a way that feels intentional rather than forced. Our goal is to create a resource that helps teachers answer these essential questions so that mindfulness can be integrated authentically and support both regulation and learning throughout the day.
Our primary audience is educators working with elementary and middle school learners, though the mindful moment activities can be adapted for a wide range of age groups. This OER may also support education students and new teachers who are beginning to build their social–emotional learning toolkit. We are designing for educators who have some familiarity with the idea of mindfulness but may not yet feel confident leading it consistently or understanding how it supports classroom regulation.
Teachers need simple, low-pressure ways to weave mindfulness into the school day without interrupting their lessons or adding more work to an already full schedule. Mindfulness activities need to feel natural in the flow of the classroom — quick, adaptable, and easy to introduce in the moment. Our resource is designed to show how short movements or mindful pauses can blend into regular routines so they don’t feel forced or out of place. We also want to give teachers options they can use to support the different emotions and energy levels they see in their students throughout the day. By offering approachable examples and language, our goal is to help teachers feel confident trying mindfulness in their own classrooms and modelling it in a way that feels authentic to them.
Our main goal is to help teachers understand what mindfulness is and why it is meaningful for students’ emotional regulation and attention. We also aim to highlight the balance between calm, still mindfulness practices and movement-based mindful moments, showing how both can be used authentically in everyday learning. Providing clear examples of classroom application will help educators see how these practices can become part of their regular routines.
We live in a fast-paced, digital world where classrooms often move quicker than teachers or students can comfortably keep up. It’s understandable that many educators feel stretched thin, overwhelmed, or unsure of how to support emotional regulation alongside academic demands. As a group, we believe mindfulness can offer a practical and meaningful way to slow things down. Our motivation is to provide teachers with a resource they can return to—a small but reliable toolkit that makes mindfulness feel doable, meaningful, and genuinely supportive. By giving educators simple strategies they can use anytime throughout the day, we hope to create calmer, more positive learning environments that benefit both teachers and students.
A teacher who feels unsure about how, when, and why to use mindfulness in their classroom needs a clear and accessible resource that breaks down mindful moments in simple, adaptable ways so that they can confidently support students’ emotional regulation and create a calmer, more positive learning environment.
Learners will be able to:
Understand that mindfulness involves being present in the moment and noticing emotions, thoughts, and sensations without distraction.
Demonstrate increased focus and emotional regulation after engaging in brief mindfulness activities.
Gain confidence in recognizing how mindfulness impacts their own emotions and share personal strategies they find effective.
Reflect on how different mindfulness techniques can be adapted to support the diverse needs of both students and educators.
IDEATION:
As a group, we agreed that our OER needed to feel simple, quick to use, and genuinely helpful during busy moments in the school day. While working through Phase 1, we noticed that teachers benefit most from very short activities, clear guidance on when to use them, and language that helps students connect the activity to an emotion or purpose. This led us to the idea of a small collection of “Mindfulness Moments,” each organized by purpose—such as focus, calm, or reset—and by duration (e.g., 30 seconds, 1 minute, or 2 minutes).
During brainstorming, we explored 3 possible delivery formats:
Slide-based OER: one mindfulness moment per slide
Short video: similar to Challenge B, using an animation with teacher voiceover, or a video of the teacher explaining a concept with simple visuals so students are able to follow along
Quick references: quick notes the teacher can print and stick to their desk like “if students are restless, try ___” or “If students seem low-energy try ___.”
After discussing these options, we chose a combination of the first two formats. Our final OER will include a set of short, repeatable mindfulness activities that explain the why to teachers and the how to students, making them easy to integrate authentically into the school day.
Scene 1: Introduction (Signaling):
Title: “Mindfulness Moment: Reset”
Narration: “Let’s take a quick mindfulness moment to reset our brains.”
Scene 2: Why we’re doing this (Coherence):
Have a brain, heart, and clock in the scene (cartoon)
Narration: “This moment helps your body slow down, so it’s easier to focus on the next activity.”
Scene 3: Posture (Modality):
Cartoon character sitting upright, feet flat.
Narration: “Sit with your back straight, put both feet on the floor, and rest your hands.”
Scene 4: Breathing (Temporal Contiguity):
A breathing circle like something from a “relaxation video” from youtube.
Narration: “Breathe in and hold for 3 seconds and breathe out, repeat 3 times).”
Scene 5: Mindfulness cue (Segmenting):
Narration: “As you breathe, notice how your body feels loose, your shoulders drop down, your face gets relaxed…”
Scene 6: Return to task (UDL)
Add icons of notebook and laptop.
Narration: “Bring your attention back to your current task and don’t be afraid to use this whenever needed.”
When we were planning out our mindful moment activity, we tried to be thoughtful about a few multimedia learning principles that would make the experience clear and easy for students. We used Signaling by keeping the title and purpose very straightforward so teachers and students know right away what the activity is about. We also followed Coherence by choosing only simple visuals (like a brain or breathing cue) instead of anything busy or distracting, since the whole point is to help students settle. For Modality, the idea was to pair short spoken instructions with matching visuals so students can process the steps without getting overloaded by text. Lastly, we used Segmenting by breaking the activity into smaller steps, which should make it easier for teachers to guide and for students to follow at their own pace.
The prototype for our Open Educational Resource (OER) has been created using Google Sites. The goal of this prototype is to provide a simple, accessible first version of our “Mindful Moments in the Classroom” resource—one that demonstrates the structure, visual design, and layout of the final OER.
This prototype includes:
A Home page introducing the purpose of the OER
A Teacher Resources section with background information on mindful moments and guidance on choosing the right activity
A Mindfulness Moments section with one completed activity page (“Mindfulness Moment: Reset”), based on our group’s storyboard
A dedicated Open License page using the CC BY 4.0 license
This prototype highlights the core design principles we aim to apply in the final version: clarity, simplicity, accessibility, and alignment with mindfulness practices. Future iterations would include additional mindful moment activities, visuals, and potentially short video demonstrations.
Final Website Link:
https://sites.google.com/view/mindfulmomentsintheclassroom/home?authuser=0
PEER FEEDBACK:
Through our peer reviews, one of the most consistent pieces of feedback we received was that the prototype is clear, well structured, and relevant to teachers now. We got notes that the overall design was simple and clean with text and titles appearing only where they needed to be. This clarity led to them having an easy time navigating our content. Our reviewers also liked our idea calling it well-conceived and was presented properly for its intended audience of a teacher dealing with a busy classroom. They liked the idea of it being a sort of reference in their toolkit. Another common aspect in the reviews was that the website's scenes and flow felt straightforward for both teachers and students to follow intuitively.
However, our classmates identified multiple areas for improvement. There were a few visual design issues such as the green background with the gray texts; it reduced readability and made some sections harder to read. Another piece of feedback we received was to make sure that all the visuals on the screen directly supported the script because some parts seemed confusing or distracting when they did not connect with the narration. One reviewer did point out that the organization and labeling of menu or drop down elements could be clarified so that the material related to the element is much more in tune with the element name. The final big piece of feedback we received was asking if mindfulness moments should remain silent or have some sort of sound where they suggested that having an audio choice would fit better.
Overall, the feedback we received was mostly positive as most reviewers seemed to be happy or impressed with our prototype where they thought it was a smart idea and matched well to an authentic busy classroom. The feedback we received that were giving suggestions on improvements was mostly about readability and labeling issues while only one reviewer mentioned the audio option.
TEAM REFLECTION:
As a group, it was clear to us when reading through the feedback we received that our peers felt much the same that we did about the importance of mindfulness in classrooms. Not just about mindfulness itself either, but the fact that it should be simple, easy for anyone to understand and short so that it can be incorporated into any part of the day without disruption. We feel that we accomplished that and the feedback reflected that. The same went for our storyboard that we created, it was received with generally positive feedback and highlighted how our step-by-step approach was able to draw upon narration and visuals to model mindfulness in a way that felt appropriate in regards to development.
With that being said, there is always room for improvement and there were a few areas that we took notice of when reviewing our peer feedback. We emphasized the use of the coherence principle throughout our prototype but it was brought to our attention that some of our visuals didn’t necessarily align with the narration. An example of this would be where we had a heart icon that was beside a brain in the second scene of our storyboard. The issue that was pointed out to us here was that this was just creating visual noise that was mostly unnecessary and didn’t exactly align with our script. Keeping this in mind, we thought about Mayers’s (2021) principles of coherence, which we previously mentioned as being a big part of our prototype, and the contiguity principle. Both these principles emphasize the fact that any material that is just extra and not relevant shouldn’t be used as it’s not meaningful as well as it is just increasing the cognitive load of the reader.
So now that we’ve gone through the feedback, both positive as well as looking at areas for improvement, we will revise our OER to address the concerns brought to our attention. Going back to the last paragraph, we emphasized coherence as being one of our key principles so to exemplify this we looked specifically at the example we gave and removed the heart visual in scene 2. In terms of the website itself, the feedback called for changing colors as well as tweaking some of our headers. We addressed all this by making the website more user friendly and making it more visually appealing. By taking both the peer feedback and keeping the UDL guidelines in mine (Cast, 2018) we were able to create a more engaging website.
When reflecting on this process as a group, we can see that while there are many strong points to using multimedia as a method to teach mindfulness it doesn’t come without its limitations. As we’ve learned from Mayer (2021), using multimedia in a way that is well-designed not only is going to reduce cognitive load but it can also help with improving comprehension for learners. With that being said, mindfulness revolves around an internal focus within one’s body and mind, which means that media can really only be used as a support as opposed to being the main focus. If multimedia is being used in such a way that its visuals are becoming more of a distraction or they are just completely unclear it will have very little effect and possibly a negative one. The revisions that we made seek to use multimedia in a way that adds to the mindfulness experience by using visuals that are not only simple but serve a purpose.
In summary of what we just discussed, this process showed us how important it is to align multimedia design with the needs of teachers in a way that is practical along with backing that up using evidence-based principles from the different learning theories we have explored in this course. The peer feedback we received was a big influencer on how we went about making our OER become more user friendly as well as adaptable for all educators. We learned the importance of our users' experience with this website and how we can make it feel more connected for those users.
CAST. (2018). Universal Design for Learning guidelines version 2.2. Author. https://udlguidelines.cast.org/
Mayer, R. E. (2021). Multimedia learning (3rd ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Murphy, S. (2019). Fostering mindfulness : building skills that students need to manage their attention, emotions, and behavior in classrooms and beyond (1st ed.). Pembroke Publishers Limited.
I really enjoyed working on this project because mindfulness is a really important subject to talk about. Our lives are so busy, so it is such a great practice to take the time to be mindful. We all felt similarly about this and thought it would be a great idea to create this as a resource for teachers to use with their classes. They too have busy jobs and so offering this kind of opportunity makes doing so that much easier. Working through this project was a great opportunity to explore this subject further as it was meaningful even just for me. I have always wanted to know more about mindfulness and I learned a lot as we worked through this project. I look forward to taking what I have learned forward with me into future work as an educator.
For this project, I contributed by helping to design and build the Google Sites prototype and by co-writing the content for the “Mindfulness Moment: Reset” page, including the structure and wording of the activity. I also helped shape how our storyboard translated into the final layout so that it felt simple and usable for teachers. Michael contributed a lot of strength in connecting mindfulness back to our earlier work on the mind and exercise, and he helped ensure our learning objectives and explanations stayed grounded in theory while still being practical. Kate was really helpful as she had experience in her previous project and really supported the clarity of our language for teachers as well as the overall tone. As a team we worked really well together and kept things focused and our communication was really great. Despite our good chemistry, we could have improved by testing our drafts earlier with peers or potential users and not only keeping it between us.
Working on this project with Michael and Taha ended up being a really positive experience, and I feel like each of us contributed something meaningful to the final OER. I appreciated that Michael tied our topic back to work I had done previously in Challenge B—his recognition of that connection really helped ground our direction and made the project feel cohesive. Taha took the lead on the ideation and storyboard, which gave us a clear structure to work from when shaping the site. My main contributions were creating and refining the Google Site, writing a large portion of the teacher-facing content, and making sure the overall design felt clean, accessible, and aligned with the course principles. As a team, we communicated well overall, though one area we could improve on is sharing drafts earlier so we aren’t waiting on each other right at the end. That said, I’m proud of how we pulled everything together. The mix of our different strengths—content writing, visual structure, and conceptual framing—made the project stronger than if any of us had done it alone.