Category: Critical Thinking

3-12, Creative Thinking, Critical Thinking, Research, Student Products, Teaching Tools

The Big Fib Podcast Planner

Terri Eichholz

One of my most recent workshop additions is one on using podcasting in the classroom. The title is, “From Script to Sound: Engaging Student Learning Through Podcasting.” During this three hour PD, participants learn how to use podcasts as a tool to help with reading and listening comprehension as well as to develop critical thinking skills. In the second half, they learn how to create podcasts using Canva (yes, it can be done!).

One of my favorite ways to start students off with creating in any kind of media is to use a “mentor” piece, whether it’s text, songs, poetry, video, or podcasts. In this case, we use a podcast called, “The Big Fib.” This is one of many productions suitable for kids that you can find on the GZM classroom site, an excellent resource which I blogged about earlier this year.

Choose an episode of the podcast that has a format your students can emulate for a topic you’re teaching. I chose “The Big Fib” because the premise of the show is that two people are being questioned, an expert and a fibber. The listener is supposed to be able to discern from their responses who is the expert and who is the fibber. There is a different topic each time, such as Ancient Egypt. The structure of the show not only supports critical thinking skills, but also easily allows for students to make their own similar podcast on any topic they are studying in class. (Though it’s not part of the GZM family of podcasts, another great “mentor podcast” is, “Smash, Boom, Best,” which you can read more about in this post.)

During the latest workshop, the teachers got to try out using the podcast planner which I’ve made based on “The Big Fib,” and to spend time working in Canva to make their podcasts. We didn’t have time to finish, but they got a good understanding of the steps, and I was completely floored by their creativity! One group chose the show, “Bluey” as their topic (which is apparently an extremely moving show despite being for pre-school kids), another was doing Edgar Allan Poe, and a third group — composed of an art teacher and two language teachers — had come up with a podcast they called, “Just Say It,” where they would ask a question and the two guests were supposed to respond in Spanish (but one would not be responding correctly).

The variety of topics from the teachers made it clear that this is something that could be done as a great assessment tool in most subjects because you could pretty much have students “show what they know” about anything with this activity.

If you’d like to make your own copy of the planning document they used (I made some modifications based on their feedback), click on this link. And, if you’d like to have me do this workshop with a group of teachers in your district, virtually or in-person, drop me a line at terrieichholz@engagetheirminds.com!

3-5, 6-12, Art, Creative Thinking, Critical Thinking, Math

AI Text to Image Mandalas

Terri Eichholz

I was listening to a podcast this week in which Steven Soderbergh, the famous director, stated, “I am not interesting; I am interested.” This is absolutely how I feel about myself. In fact, I responded, “Curious” to a recent Twitter post asking, “What’s Your Word?” I could spend all day learning new things, and I get really excited when any of those things happens to be something I think might be of interest to you.

On an AI thread in Twitter the other day, someone shared a bunch of images they created with Midjourney, an AI tool. The artwork involved something called, “knolling photography“, which reminded me of natural mandalas. As some of you may know, I used to do a unit on mathematical masterpieces with my 4th graders that included mandalas, and we used many methods to create some. You can see one of my posts about this here. I thought I would jump down this rabbit hole to see if I could create any decent mandalas with some free AI tools at my fingertips (Midjourney is not one of them), and I was pleasantly surprised with the results.

Since Canva is free to all teachers, I started with its “Text to Image” tool, and asked it to make a mandala of quilled flowers. Here is the result:

I also asked for one made with seashells.

Then I asked it to change the style to “watercolor” for another flower mandala. Here was the response:

Even though Canva is free for educators, there are some of you who don’t use it, so I decided to test out another AI chat tool, Bing, in case you wanted a different option. (By the way, if you have the Adobe Creative Suite subscription, you can also try Firefly to do this.)

When my students created mandalas, we worked a lot on symbolism and the meaning of colors, so I started by trying to ask Bing to create a mandala of sports equipment (because that’s invariably what some of my students do). That did not go well. The images were extremely abstract and not recognizable. I finally settled on one where I was able to request a specific type of mandala (spiral dot), the colors red, blue, and green, and a photo of a soccer ball in the middle.

Bing allows you to upload photos, but I didn’t have any success in it making mandalas out of the couple of photos that I tried in the limited time I experimented.

What would students learn from this activity? As I mentioned before, our previous mandala lessons included symbolism and the meaning of colors. We also learned about different types of symmetry and the history of mandalas in many cultures. Creating mandalas themselves helped them to delve more into their own values and creativity. And trying to make them with AI tools will not only bring up philosophical and ethical discussion, but also help them to refine their critical thinking skills to improve their “prompt engineering.”

As Steven Soderbergh also states in that podcast episode when asked about AI, that it’s an iterative tool, but, “It hasn’t experienced anything.” He quotes a Pixar motto, “Be wrong as fast as you can… Just get to the end. If this helps people get to the end of something, fine.” Maybe this is one more option you can give students to get to the vision they have for their mathematical masterpiece — or to create a new vision even better than they imagined.

3-12, Creative Thinking, Critical Thinking, Philosophy, Teaching Tools, Writing

Once Upon a Picture

Terri Eichholz

If you are looking for a site that will pique your students’ imaginations and spark some creativity (especially for writing), you should consider Once Upon a Picture.

Those of you who subscribe to my newsletter know that I usually include a “Tik Tok Teacher Hack” in each issue. I know that there are various opinions about Tik Tok out there, but I honestly find a lot of wonderful resources for teaching on Tik Tok, and this is one of them. @jessicam.reid is a Tik Tokker who often talks about AI creation sites for teachers, but she thought this resource was so great that she did a short video about it.

The images on Once Upon a Picture are curated by a teacher in the UK named Sam as a passion project. They are digital photos, animations, and illustrations that are magical, surrealistic, and undeniably thought-provoking. According to Sam, each artist has given permission for the images to be shared.

Because Sam is a teacher, there are also questions that are listed on the page for each individual picture — questions that can be used to prod your students to dig deeper and imagine the stories behind each image. Here is one example.

There is also a challenge book that you can download for free as well as a Reading Comprehension handbook and some samples of student writing (all under “More” in the main menu.) In addition, Sam has created different collections of images such as “The Thinking Collection” meant to provoke philosophical discussions and “The Inference Collection” of images selected from Sam’s own work in the primary classroom.

If you want to try your hand at creating your own unusual images, Canva has a Text-to-Image AI tool that is kind of fun to try. I’ve had varying results. The image I am including below was downloaded from Adobe’s Beta Firefly program, (which is part of my paid subscription to Adobe). Note that Adobe is trying to be responsible by watermarking its AI created images.

I would have definitely used Once Upon a Picture in my GT classroom or any class in which I taught writing or wanted to encourage deep discussions. I hope you’ll find it useful, too!

Canva Choice Board made with Bingo Card app
3-12, Creative Thinking, Critical Thinking, Teaching Tools

Make a Canva Bingo Card/Choice Board

Terri Eichholz

Canva for Education has many bingo card templates, but did you know that it also has a Bingo generator app? This means you can not only make Bingo cards, but also even create choice boards that look engaging. I’ll go through the steps that I used to make a choice board in a few minutes.

Get Your Words

What do you want to put on your Bingo Card? Maybe it’s vocabulary or famous people for a bingo game, or maybe it’s tasks for a choice card. Maybe you don’t know. If you don’t already have a list, you can open a Canva Doc and use the Magic Write feature to generate some ideas. (There will also be a limited amount of pre-formatted lists in the Bingo Generator app.) I went ahead and gave Magic Write the following prompt, “9 tasks for 3rd graders to do to demonstrate their understanding of metamorphosis. Each task should be 4 words or less. You will want the prompt to specify the number of words if it’s generating tasks or the sentences will be too long for the generator to fit properly in each cell.

Get Your Template

Once you have the words/short phrases you want on the card listed, highlight and copy them. Then, it’s time to find your Bingo Card template. Do a search on Canva’s home page for “Bingo Card” and choose the one that looks close enough to what you’d like in design and number of cells. Open the template. Delete anything that’s already in the cells, and design your card. If you think you are going to want multiple cards that have the cells randomly rearranged, make that many duplicates of your card when it’s design is ready.

Find the App and Paste in Your List

Since I have been using the app, it appears in my left menu as “Bingo Cards.” I can click on it, and the generator menu that you see above appears. However, you may have to locate the app the first time by clicking on “Apps” in the menu and searching for it. Note that if “Bingo Cards” does not appear in your search, you may be using a design in which that app doesn’t work. For example, you can’t find it when you are making a Doc.

Paste your list in where it prompts you to “Enter some words.” Then select the grid size and number of cards you would like to generate as well as the font. I turned off gridlines because I already have a pretty template and don’t want the lines.

Create Bingo Cards

When you hit the purple button, cards will be generated on the side as you can see below. These are actually transparent images that you can drag over to your template, resize, and fit them as you like.

The generator went a bit wonky with the font sizes, I’m guessing because I went with phrases of different lengths instead of single words. I’m okay with that because it still save me a ton of time, the words are legible, and the template makes it less stark.

Conclusion

Once you do this process one or two times, it gets even faster. You can probably even have older students make their own Bingo Cards or Choice Boards, and they will enjoy the magic. Let me know if you think of any other ways to utilize this Canva App! Check out this post if you want to learn more about how I combined AI with Canva to make differentiated Choice Menus.

question marks on paper crafts
Creative Thinking, Critical Thinking, K-12, Philosophy, Problem Solving

Conundrums from Class Dojo

Terri Eichholz

Conundrums from Class Dojo are short animated videos (less than 2 minutes) that pose ethical and philosophical questions to students. Each one has a video, a question to discuss along with an activity sheet for recording responses, and the option to share the idea with parents.

How to Access Conundrums

You can access Conundrums even if you don’t have a Class Dojo account. The series is part of their Social Emotional Learning collection, which you can find here. The Conundrums set is the largest of the ten categories by far with 27 videos. You may remember that in the past I’ve also recommended their Growth Mindset videos.

An Example of a Conundrum

One example of a Conundrum from Class Dojo is “The Tree Conundrum.” Students are given a hypothetical situation where a tree that is located on private land has been found to provide the best-tasting fruit in the world — and it’s the only one. The family who owns the property is not interested in sharing their tree, but has offered to sell one seed from the tree for a billion dollars.

Your conundrum is to decide whether someone should pay for the seed, the government should take over the property, no action should be taken, or solve the problem a different way.

Why Use Conundrums with Students?

Students love to debate topics (think about the popularity of “Would You Rather”), and these types of discussions are always opportunities for them to see things from multiple perspectives and learn how to justify their responses. They can practice their creative problem solving skills and critical thinking while feeling safe in participating because there is not one right answer. These are also quick activities that can be done after a long test or other moments when you don’t have quite enough time to start a brand new lesson. Or, you can extend them into a longer lesson using a Socratic Smackdown.

More Ideas

If you like these, and your students want more, you can also try:

You can find these and more ideas in my Philosophy for Kids Wakelet.

Critical Thinking, K-12, Universal Design for Learning, Writing

More Hexagonal Thinking Ideas

Terri Eichholz

I bookmark a lot of examples that I see on social media of uses for Hexagonal Thinking. Sometimes teachers who have been to one of my workshops mention me, and it’s great to see HT being used in the wild. Recently, one teacher even emailed me a Canva example from her 3rd graders!

What is Hexagonal Thinking?

Hexagonal Thinking involves using hexagon-shaped cards to represent different ideas, concepts, or topics. These cards can be moved around and connected to one another in order to explore relationships, make connections, and generate new ideas. You can have words and/or images on the hexagons, and connections are represented by moving hexagons next to each other so they share sides. I first learned about this technique from Pam Hook. Below is an example one small group in my classroom did when we were reflecting on the book, Tuck Everlasting.

Hexagonal Thinking by 4th Graders for Tuck Everlasting

Who Can Use Hexagonal Thinking?

If you don’t know what Hexagonal Thinking is, I cannot emphasize enough how flexible this strategy is; it can be adapted to use in any classroom for any subject in any grade level. In fact, one teacher challenged me on Twitter when I made that claim by asking, “#physed application?” I didn’t even have to answer, because another reader gave this list of options:

Thanks, Erik. I couldn’t have said it better myself!

Literature Example

Becky Gentry was kind enough to share a link with me from a Canva project her 3rd graders did using Hexagonal Thinking with Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.

As you can see, students don’t usually just discuss and arrange the hexagons. They generally explain their rationale for the placement in written form or out loud.

Hexagonal Thinking + Math

My former colleague, Kelly Cross, has been bringing HT to math teachers in her district. Here is a recent example:

Speaking of math, how about this idea tweeted by Laura Depp to use hexagonal pattern blocks instead of cutting out paper?

And even though this isn’t technically Hexagonal Thinking, it is a Twitter thread involving hexagons, thinking, and math from one of my favorite mathematicians, Dan Finkel and one of his followers, Hana Murray (click on this link if you want to see the whole thread):

AI + Global Goals + Hexagonal Thinking

Lastly, I have this Tweet from Marilyn McAlister, which not only demonstrates using Hexagonal Thinking with the Global Goals, but also offers the idea of using Chat GPT to suggest the terms to put in your hexagons. Pair that with Pam Hook’s Solo Hexagon Generator and you have a winning combination!

Want to Learn More?

If these examples intrigue you, but you don’t know where to start, you can take my online course or invite me to your school or district to do a workshop (terrieichholz@engagetheirminds.com). You can also see some other ideas for using HT in the classroom in recent blog posts I’ve done, such as this one or this one. Or, do a search on my website for even more! You can even download some free templates.