Using Vocabulary Know-It Boards as a Formative - Google Slides Manipulatives

As I continue to embark on this hybrid environment of teaching both digital and in-person students simultaneously, I am learning how important formative assessments and observations are in informing me as the teacher how to proceed when for most students I cannot physically witness their progress. My colleague Rachel Ash introduced me to Google Slide manipulatives, and she has demonstrated a way in which students can let me know how well they know their vocabulary: Vocabulary Know-It Boards (look for the specific activity on the page - you can actually make a copy for yourself from her example).

Essentially, from the list of 25ish provided words, students will drag the word to the quadrant which best describes their knowledge of the word: I Really Know It, I Know It, I Kind of Know It, I Don't Know It.

Student Examples:

Observations

1. This is a really easy way for students to "check-in" with me about what they feel like they know and what they do not know.
2. The downside of this is that the vocabulary words are presented in isolation, so in some ways, it may be that students actually do know the words when they see them in context but in isolation, they do not.
3. Using Google Classroom, this is so easy to assign, because I just "Make a Copy for Each Student" and then they can "Turn It In" when finished.
4. I do manually tally what words are most commonly being placed in the "I Kind of Know" and "I Don't Know" quadrants. These become the words which I target.
5. I do make this an assignment for students to ensure that I receive feedback from every student, but I also give them a 100 as a completion grade.
6. I do this assignment every 3-4 weeks to see what students feel like they know and what they feel like they do not know.

Creating Manipulatives Using Google Slides - Picture Sentence Matching

School has now been back in session for 1.5 weeks (albeit virtually), and my technology goal for this year is to learn Google Classroom. Even though my district uses the Brightspace learning management system (with which I am familiar using it as a grad student so I understand the student perspective), I have been wanting to learn more about Google Classroom, especially since we are currently teaching in a digital environment. Wow - why did I wait so long?!! Although there is a definite learning curve involved, I really like it!

One of the tech tools which I am learning how to implement is using Google Slides to create manipulatives - thanks to my colleague Rachel Ash for introducing me to this! It is a wonderful way for students to interact with material and to manipulate it in a digital environment. Even better, it lines up perfectly with Google Classroom, because I can assign it to every student, who then can work on it and turn it back into me all within Google Classroom. On her blog, Rachel has written about how she has used manipulatives to create a My Favorites and Opinion Board assignments for students (which I too have implemented in classes with great success thanks to Rachel!). 

Just recently, I did a Movie Talk with my classes via Zoom (it was an interesting experience). As a post-reading activity, I created a manipulative for students to interact with the story in a basic way - basic, because I myself am still a novice at this. Using screenshots from the movie talk clip, I created a 5-slide manipulative where from a list of sentences, students had to drag the sentence which best described the picture. 

Rather than write out a list of directions of how to do this (it is kind of complex to write out), let me show you to do it. Once you learn the basics of creating manipulatives on Google Slides, it is not difficult. 

I hope you found this helpful, and I have a ton of ideas now about how to use manipulatives, so I hope to write about them here.