HyperDocs... Giving Students a Choice

With the blended and personalized learning push in classrooms, students are able to take ownership of their learning.  They can set goals, choose the pace they work at for each assignment, and even choose the best way for them to learn about a specific topic.  As a teacher, giving the students the tools they need to learn can be hard to manage.  This is where HyperDocs come into play.  HyperDocs are Docs, Slides, Drawings, Canva... any tool you can think of... listing resources and videos to engage students in the learning process.  You can list multiple resources for each learning standard and let the students decide which resources they find best suited to their learning style.  

They can be in the format of:

• a menu where students choose one starter, main course, and dessert
• tables with Explain and Task column headers
• a Tic-tac-toe board where they have to get three in a row to cover all topics
• any interesting format you can design!

               Image Credit

HyperDocs were originally in Google Docs; however, using Slides and other tools beef up the interactivity and how you can share the learning resources.    

Below you will find links to more resources on HyperDocs including templates to utilize: 

Hyper What?

What's the Hype with HyperDocs

HyperDoc Templates

HyperDoc Samples

Primary Example

If Kindergarteners Can Do It, All Our Students Can!

The Kindergarten team at Sandburg is rocking technology throughout the school year.  Elizabeth Deuser, Stefanie Young, Kayla Adams, and Michele Rosenow started the year having their students use technology to help express their thoughts and opinions at a time when letter recognition is still new to many students.  Using the Clever badges to login, kindergarteners started by recording themselves expressing thoughts and ideas using FlipGrid.com. To introduce FlipGrid and get students use to the program, they had students record their favorite color. From there, students discussed what career they would like to have when they grew up.  They utilized FlipGrid for many following units. Students have even gone back on, when done with other work, to respond to a prompt again or to a classmates video.

After introducing FlipGrid, the team introduced Google Slides to their students.  First, they had their students create posters on paper for a unit. For a following unit, they took the same idea but had the students create posters on Slides instead.  They gave the students a template and assess to an image folder that allowed the students to dress up the Caillou and his background based on the season they studies. In an upcoming unit, students will create a 4 slide slideshow as an assessment piece for the unit.  

I love how these teachers are using one tool at a time, scaffolding the learning, to introduce the kindergarteners to the new tools. Great job Elizabeth Deuser, Stefanie Young, Kayla Adams, and Michele Rosenow.