One of my favorite in-person classroom activities is to move real or toy objects about the classroom and between students. This might be "moving furniture" into a certain room or location or asking for and receiving a piece of food or clothing. Such activities are useful to practice vocabulary, prepositions, command forms, direct and indirect objects, and even register. Depending on who I am giving the object to, I may need to use different pronouns.
How can I recreate this engaging and interactive exercise in the online environment? With Jamboard, of course! The basic principle is to use images of people, places, and things and then drag and drop them into a new location. I can create a background scene of a house, for example, or images of different kinds of people in each corner of the frame. On a new layer, I create individual items such as a chair, bed, blanket, toys or book. I can respond to a partner's command, such as "Put the couch in the bedroom. Put the blanket on the couch." Similarly, I can narrate my actions, such as "I'm giving the children the toys, but I'm giving the grandfather a book." Obviously, this type of activity can be adapted for use in many different contexts.
My specific example comes from a unit on travel, in which we practice direct and indirect objects by giving travel items to different people.
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As a homework assignment, students were asked to move the objects around the frame and describe the action taking place. For this purpose, each student copied the Jamboard for individual use. The next day during class, the task shifted to small groups of students, who worked together on one frame, listening to and watching each other and providing feedback as needed.
To use Jamboard in this way, follow these steps:
Create the background image for your frame
1. You can use the tools in Jamboard to design your frame. For example, click on the image icon to search for pictures of people. Position each image in a different section of the frame. Add drawings, shapes, or text boxes as desired. Once you like the composition you have created, save the entire frame as an image. Click on the three vertical dots in the upper right corner and select "Save Frame as Image." This saves the composition as a whole and the individual parts are no longer moveable. This new image will be saved on your computer. You will need to find it to upload it into Jamboard in the next step. (You can also create the background image in another tool, such as Powerpoint. Just be sure to save it as an image file, JPEG.)
Upload the background image into a new Jamboard frame
1. In Jamboard, click on the add image icon, navigate to your saved image from the previous step, and upload the image into the frame.
2. Resize the background image as desired.
3. This background image is now the bottom layer of the frame. Anything you add from now on will be on top of the background layer. You will be able to move the new items without altering anything in the background layer.
Create the images or objects that will be moveable
1. Decide which pictures you will need for the project. You may have images already saved on your computer. You may want to conduct a Google Search for images with language or country specific criteria and save them to your computer. You can also just use the Google search function built into Jamboard.
2. Click on the add image icon, navigate to your saved image, and upload the image into the frame. Resize as necessary and drag to it's starting position.
3. Repeat this process for as many draggable images you want for the project.
Tips for scaffolding the exercise
1. When students first see the completed frame, it is not apparent what the task is. To introduce the activity and practice the necessary vocabulary before moving the objects around, I created several frames introducing the images and providing written examples of the sentences students will create while moving the objects. In a physical classroom, I would have written this information on the whiteboard for reference during the activity.
Preparing a version for use with small groups
To use the Jamboard with small groups during a Zoom session, you will need to duplicate the last frame multiple times (enough for each group to have its own frame.) See this post from last week on how to duplicate frames.
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