Design Your Space — Getting to know your students virtually

Need a back to school activity? This project works both in class and virtually. It’s a great way to get a quick glance at writing and media literacy. It will set students up with the skills needed to work with Google Slides in new, interactive ways.

Design Your Space: How it Works

Your students are going to make a virtual room using Google Slides, think Bitmoji Classroom but instead of you making it — it’s your students.

(if you need a walkthrough of how to make a Bitmoji classroom, click here)

The students will come up with items that need to be placed in the room that represent some kind of importance to them. Depending on the grade level you can choose how many items that needs to be. For younger grades, you can pre-insert images.

The images should be downloaded as PNGs so that they will have a clear background. Alternatively, you can use a program like remove.bg to remove the background from any photo.

The images will link to another page within their slide show. A short paragraph should be there. For example, clicking on the soccer ball in the image above will lead to the image below. This project is actually a modification on an old project I had students do, retelling important events from their life.

Make sure the students have a “Go Back’ button, on each back to reset to the main menu.

Once complete, have students submit their work on Google Classroom. In a separate Google Slide, list student names and link to each presentation. Change the URL from “edit” to “present” so that student work can be seen by their peers.

This project can either be free flow with students exploring each other’s work, or you can have students give feedback. You can also have students walk you through their “room” for an oral mark. Virtually, this can be done by having students share their screen in Google Meet.

Extensions

• Use the idea of Google Slides with links to have students create their own choose your adventure slide. This can be done following a read-a-loud.
• Students can re-create the rooms of characters from a story, with their own history revealed through interactive pages.
• Explore historical figures by creating a walkthrough of their life.

There are many ways the skills learned in this project can be used in other activities later on. Making projects fun and engaging is always important, but now more than ever. Let students be creative and have fun!