In this video I’m going to show you how to make a choice board using Google Docs.
Choice boards are an effective way to build student autonomy and agency, to increase their
sense of self-awareness, and to increase engagement. They can also be used synchronously or asynchronously
and you can use them if you're teaching online or in a physical classroom. My name is Sam
Kary and this is my YouTube channel for The New EdTech Classroom. If you appreciate the
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I also have a live show every Thursday at 4 o’clock Pacific Standard Time where I
dig a little bit deeper into strategic technology integration strategies and answer your questions
live on the show. In the first half of this video I'm going to show you some different
examples of how you can offer students choice with a Google Docs choice board, and then
the second half of the video I'm going to get into the nuts and bolts of how to actually
build one. I know when I first heard that I should be offering my students choice, it
seemed like an overwhelming proposition. I was having a hard time enough as it was just
keeping up with my curriculum and the idea that I would have the time and the space to
also give my students choice about what they were learning just didn't seem possible. What
I learned is that when you offer students choice, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're
giving them complete, total freedom to do whatever they want, although there might be
some instances where you do that. What I suggest you do is set up choice boards so that students
can select a single variable within a bigger picture assignment. So let's jump over to
a few examples of some choice boards so I can show you exactly what I mean. This first
choice board example is allowing students to choose their mode of learning. So the fixed
variable that I've chosen is the bigger picture topic, climate change, but what students will
be able to choose is how they go about learning about climate change. So the choice that I'm
offering students here is that they can learn about climate change by either watching this
YouTube playlist that I put together, by reading articles from this Newsela text set, by listening
to a read-aloud of the digital version of the textbook, or by going through a Khan Academy
lesson, or searching openly on Google. What's most important is that students are able to
answer certain questions that I’ve come up with about climate change and then the
students get to choose how they're going to go about learning that information. This next
choice board is related to the first one. Here students will be choosing where they
would be doing their research about a given topic. It's slightly different from the last
one, because rather than emphasizing different learning modalities, this choice board is
giving students the option to pick which resources they would want to go to in order to learn
more about a topic. So here I pre-identified that all of these websites, Newsela, National
Geographic, Crash Course, TedEd, Google Arts and Culture, and Britannica all had relevant
information that pertained to the topic that we were studying. This third choice board
is set up to allow students to choose an area of study within a broader category. This kind
of choice board is a good option as an end of unit study or as an extension that you
could give to students that they could work on when they've already finished their assignments.
Here, the bigger picture category that students were learning about was Egypt, and then when
students were finished with their regular assignments for our Egypt unit, what they
could do is jump over to this choice board and then dig into some topics that interested
them and learn about those on their own. For example, they could choose to learn about
mummification, Egyptian myths, or hieroglyphics. If you want to take this to the next level
what you can also do is have students do different types of projects that reflect what they learned
about these different topics, and then they can teach the rest of the class about what
they learned and what they'll be showing will be different from the rest of the classes
because they've chosen a specific topic that they're interested in. This fourth choice
board is similar to the last one in that students can also choose a more specific topic within
a broader category, but it's a little bit more focused. With his choice board, students
are learning particular aspects of Latin American artists, and the choice variable is that students
get to choose which Latin American artist they would be studying. If you want to add
an additional layer of choice, you can also tell students if an artist is not on the list,
they can also go out and figure out which person they would want to study on their own,
and then just run that by you to make sure that it fits within the parameters of the
assignment. Then with this type of choice board what you can do is strategically group
students after they've gone out and learned about a particular artist so that all the
other students in the class can learn about somebody new. The final choice board is a
choice board where the choice variable is that students get to choose how they're going
to show what they learned. This type of choice board works better more toward the middle
or end of the year when you’ve already introduced students to these different types of creativity
apps. So let's say, for example, that students just learned all about the respiratory system.
What you could have them do here is choose whether or not they want to show what they've
learned by recording a podcast, by making a digital book or a digital comic, they could
make a graphic design, a video, or a slides presentation. When giving students this type
of choice, you'll just want to make sure that you're giving students key criteria that they
need to include in their final projects. Now that we’ve looked at some different examples
of how you can offer students choice with a choice board, let's hop over here to Google
Docs to look at the nuts and bolts of how to actually make one. First I usually change
the page setup from portrait to landscape. You can do that by going up here to ‘File,’
scrolling down to ‘Page Setup,’ and then selecting ‘Landscape.’ Then to insert
the actual board, you want to go up here to ‘Insert’ and then select ‘Table.’
Then you'll be able to choose the number of columns and rows that you want in your table
and I usually end up going with about six boxes in total. Once you've inserted your
table, you'll want to insert a title above that table. So let's call this one “Choose
Your Sources.” And after you've written that title, you’ll also want to center align
it, to choose a more interesting font, and then adjust the font size so that it's a little
bit bigger. Next we’ll want to set a uniform size for all the boxes within the table. To
do that, I'll highlight the entire table, right click on it, and then select ‘Table
Properties.’ I'll check the box next to ‘Minimum row height,’ and then enter 3
inches. Then I’ll start entering the names of each source that I want to include in each
box. After I’ve entered every source name, I’ll highlight all of the text, click center
align, change the font type, then change the font size. Then, with the text still highlighted,
I like to go up here to ‘Line spacing’ and choose ‘Add space after paragraph’
to make sure that there's some space between the text and the images that I'm about to
add. Now I'm going to bring some images in. So the first thing I'll need to do is actually
go find the images that I want. So let's say, for example, that I want to bring an image
to represent Newsela in. What I could do is search for Newsela, and then once I find an
image that I like, I can just download it onto my computer so that I can bring it into
Google Docs. Then, to bring the picture into the box, I'll go up here to ‘Insert,’
choose ‘Image,’ and then bring that picture in from my desktop. If the images aren’t
all the same size, which they probably won't be, in order to make them more uniform, what
you can do is click on the image and then select ‘Size and rotation.’ Then you can
change the size of the image. If you deselect the box to lock the image ratio, you can make
the height and width of every image the exact same dimension, though know that if you do
this it might make some images look disproportionate and a little bit funny. So another option
would be to keep the ‘lock image ratio’ box selected and then just adjust the height
or width of each image to make them more uniform. If the image still doesn't look quite right,
you can edit the white space around it by double-clicking on the image and then pulling
the black and gray crop bar down to where you want to crop the image. Next you’ll
need to make either the text or the image, or both, into hyperlinks. So to make the text
into a hyperlink, all you need to do is highlight it, right click, choose ‘Link,’ and then
paste the URL for the website that you want to direct students to right in. To make this
image into a hyperlink, simply select it, right click, select ‘Link’ again, and
then paste that same URL, and what that will do is turn this image into a live, clickable
hyperlink. The last thing you might want to do is change the background color of the individual
boxes to make the table stand out a little bit more. To do this, just click on the box,
then go up to ‘Fill background color’ and choose the color that you want filled
in for each individual box. So you can see that it's pretty easy to make a high-quality
choice board with hyperlinks out to websites using Google Docs. If you have any questions
about how I've used choice boards, or ideas based on how you've used them with your students,
I’d love to hear about those in the comments below. Thanks so much for watching my video
to the end. If you're a school leader looking to implement a strategic technology integration
plan, I'd love to talk with you about how I can help. I've included a link to newedtechschool.com
in the video description below, where you can book a free strategy session with me.
And if you're a teacher interested in additional guidance for how to effectively use education
technology in your classroom, I've also included a link for you to be able to book a call with
me so we can discuss how I might be able to help. And lastly, if you're interested in
my 21st Century Classroom course, I've also included a link in the video description,
where you can enter your email and get the latest enrollment updates. Thanks so much
and have a great week!