Lessons Learned

Do you want to “hook” your students into your topic of study? How about immersing them in the images and discussions of your subject? While we use bulletin boards for images to display information about our units of study, how about also displaying information digitally? You can put together a slide show to run continuously on your classroom television, projector & screen and on your classroom computers to surround your students with images from the unit you are studying. An example would be to show people, architecture, art, food, social scenes, etc. for a social studies unit. As inquiry driven educators, we want to put those hooks out there to lead our students to pursue answers to their own questions.

With so many recordings of famous speeches and podcasts on so many topics, it also works to either download the files when possible or set the home page in your classroom browsers to have direct links to podcasts that tie into subject matter. If you are a 1:1 laptop school, look to create a Web page with the podcast links, images and research links for your students to add as a tab to their browser home pages.

A nice source for images and screensaver software is Webshots.  Download their slide show presenter and start adding images from their vast photo database to construct a show that fits your curriculum needs. Don’t forget to check out their community pages where Webshot members share their best shots for you to download. Also think about challenging students to find more images or draw their own (think literature lessons where students draw their pictures of characters and scenes) to be added to the collection.

Cheers to Mike Lambert for starting this practice many years ago in my son’s classroom.

Image Source