During a thoroughly entertaining interactive session at ISTE 2020 last week, Tana Ruder, Adam Phyall, Carl Hooker (who also did a hilarious Lip Sync presentation), and Christina Zientek showed how you could use the concept from the hit T.V. show, Nailed It! in your classroom. If you are looking for ways to improve community, do Brain Breaks, and just have some fun with your students, their suggestions are awesome.
The first exercise was to recreate the painting, “Me and My Parrot,” by Frida Kahlo using things you could find at home. Some of the participants came up with ideas for tying this in to academics by having younger students use only objects that start with a certain letter, or (once all of the entries have been submitted) having students group people based on the objects they chose.
Activity #2 was to recreate a meme to reinforce a learning rule. I’ve used this with students before, and they really enjoy it. If you don’t want to use one of the many meme generator sites, you can use this simple Google Drawing template from Meredith Akers (shared by Tony Vincent with her permission).
Activity #3 was my favorite. The challenge was to recreate a scene from a movie using Autodraw.com. Autodraw uses Artificial Intelligence to guess what you are trying to draw and replace your own scribble with a better version. The movie scene results were hilarious.
Activity #4 was to recreate the lyrics of a song (television show theme songs are good to start with) using something from the curriculum. This activity has been another favorite in the past with my students, though the Nailed It! version suggests using just a small portion of the song.
To collect responses, you can use Flipgrid, Nearpod, Peardeck, Padlet, or whatever tool works best for you. Don’t forget that students love it when their teachers play along, so make sure your submissions are in there, too!
