Creating with Slides

This term, I really wanted to find ways to engage my Year 7/8 students more when completing Learn and Create tasks. Now that I have a group of students working at a Year 8 reading level and it was my intention to provide them with some choice when selecting their supplementary texts. We spent some time reading and discussing the School Journal story "The Seeing Hawk." Students were then given opportunities to select a topic to independently dive deeper into (as seen on our site here).

After selecting one of two learning paths, students were asked to use the information to create a fun and interesting Digital Learning Object (DLO) of their own choice. As part of our DFI sessions, we spent some time looking at Google Slides and one week I had a go at creating an interactive game (Seen Here).  So, of course, before setting them off on their way, I quickly showed off my skills making a game using Google Slides.

A few of the boys in class decided to work together and they have been problem solving their way through to create this game about the Tā Moko.  When you play the game (in present mode), the various boxes are clickable and students can select the answer they agree with before the slides flips and they find out how they did.

I was very impressed that the boys took time to try something new and they have embraced the intricacies that come along with formulating a slide show game. I also really like that they are teaching after the answer in selected to provide more information about that question topic. 

This is an awesome Create (or Create to Learn) task that extends the computer skills and computational thinking of our older students. I am excited to implement more tasks similar to this in the upcoming weeks that will allow my students to feel like they are doing something new and exciting.