Category: Universal Design for Learning

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.

Games, Student Response, Teaching Tools, Universal Design for Learning

5 SMART Ways to Engage Your Students with Lumio

Terri Eichholz

5 SMART Ways to Engage Your Students with Lumio

By Terri Eichholz

This post is sponsored by Lumio. All opinions are my own.

One lesson my students learned when presenting their Genius Hour projects was that getting their audience involved in some way improved their interest in what was being taught. The experience also helped the students to understand that planning for that interactivity takes more thought than just reading from bullet points on a slide, so many of them developed an appreciation for the efforts teachers make who go above and beyond a standard lecture. After all, the students were spending the equivalent of 6-12 hours preparing each of their presentations, and that time commitment isn’t very practical for full-time teachers.

What if teachers have help, though? This is an area where educational technology can be transformative, but piecing together products from different companies to pull together an engaging lesson is time-consuming, too – unless you make the choice to use Lumio. With Lumio, students can brainstorm, play games, use a collaborative whiteboard, practice lessons, and get assessed – all in one tool. And the best part is that you can deliver a Lumio lesson with as little or as much preparation as you would like.

A product from SMART Technologies that requires student devices without the necessity of an interactive display, Lumio is free for educators and amazingly easy to use. Its simplicity is almost deceptive when you begin to realize all of the ways you can use it. Like a few other ed tech products you may have seen or used, Lumio lessons consist of slides you present to students either as a teacher-led activity or student-paced. You can import slides from other software, such as PowerPoint, use your existing SMART Notebook files, or create something from scratch. If you choose to integrate Lumio with your Google Drive, you can directly import content from there. Even PDF’s can be directly added to the lesson. There is also a growing library of resources you can choose from, so you can duplicate or customize to your needs. This may sound familiar, but as you begin to customize a lesson, you will discover how Lumio separates itself from the pack. Here are some of the ways you can use it to engage your students.

1. Maybe your students enjoy playing online quizzes, but you’ve noticed that their enthusiasm begins to fizzle when you use the same format and platform every time. This is not an issue with Lumio. There are twelve Game-Based Activity templates to choose from, with multiple themes for each activity. Game Show and Monster Quiz are two popular ones that are sure to generate some smiles with their entertaining graphics, but you shouldn’t limit yourself to those. The Rank-Order tool has the potential to generate some insightful classroom discussions, and the Word Search activity can give the illusion of “just having fun” while secretly promoting some higher order thinking skills.

Game Based Activity Templates available from Lumio

2. Another way to keep your students involved in their learning is that you can present slides as a digital handout (to be worked on individually), a group workspace (where Lumio will automatically create groups of students to collaborate), or a whole class activity. And you can change this “on the fly” as you present with two clicks. This flexibility gives you the power to get a sense for what might work best and make last-minute decisions.

Convert pages in your lesson while editing or presenting with Lumio

3. As we know from Universal Design for Learning, engaging a class of students with different abilities means accommodating for as many of those differences as you can within your lesson design. With Lumio, you can add audio to your slides so your students can hear instructions, or you can turn on the Immersive Reader tool for them.

Embed accommodations for different ability levels

4. Whether you are doing a Design Thinking project and want students to generate ideas, or just want to find out what they already know about a topic, you can use the “Shout it Out” Activity. A couple of neat tweaks that you can make to this are that you can quickly turn on/off names to show on the screen as students contribute and you can also determine the maximum number of responses from each student. 

Add a “Shout it Out” activity for brainstorming

5. You can’t keep your class engaged if the material is too repetitive or too complicated. Formative assessments with Lumio give you the information you need to pivot if necessary. At the beginning, middle, or end of your lesson, pop in the teacher-led Response tool to get real-time feedback without skipping a beat. 

Activate prior knowledge, find out what’s puzzling your students, or design an Exit Ticket with Lumio’s Response tool

As you can see, Lumio combines all of the best features of other digital learning tools in one package, as well as adding quite a few extras that you won’t find anywhere else. Combined with the fact that it’s free, super user-friendly, and offers lots of opportunities to motivate and engage students, can you think of any reason not to click on this link and sign up right now? 

Reading, Teaching Tools, Universal Design for Learning, Websites

Levaraging the Immersive Reader tool during Virtual Learning

Terri Eichholz

For one of my current consulting jobs I am making short how-to videos for different technology tools that are helpful in distance learning. One of the recent ones that I have been recommending to teachers has been the Immersive Reader tool from Microsoft, which can be used within many of the company’s own products, like Microsoft Word, but can also be used on the Microsoft Edge web browser and in other ed tech products like Newsela and Wonderopolis.

I first wrote about Immersive Reader in a post from 2019, where I included several ways to support diverse readers and speakers with technology that I had learned about at TCEA in 2019. Leslie Fisher had done some quick demonstrations of Immersive Reader and other tech tools that could help students with translating, reading, and writing on the internet. Unfortunately, the teens and tweens I was teaching at the time did not have adequate equipment to support some of these during class – such as headphones and private screens – without making them feel singled out. Because of the pandemic, more technology has been dispersed and many students are working independently, so students may be more inclined to use these tools – if they know about them.

For the web version of Immersive Reader, students need to be using the Microsoft Edge Web browser (though there is an unofficial chrome extension that mimics Immersive Reader if you want to go that route – read my post about extensions first). When using Edge, students can generally right-click on a web page, and choose to have it read aloud. But many pages with articles will have an extra feature that you can see in the URL window – a book icon. If the book icon is visible, you can click on it. (Please be aware that the icon is only available on articles – and even then may not be present if the article is heavy with advertising and photo galleries.)

After you click on the book, you will be in “Reader View,” which takes away all of the distractions on the page. You will also get a menu right under the URL window that gives you many more options.

You can still have the page read aloud (and choose from dozens of voice options as well as the speed). But you can also use Text Preferences to change the size of the text, its spacing, and the background color. Under “Grammar Tools” you have the option of splitting words into syllables, and/or designating parts of speech with any color(s) you choose. “Reading Preferences” allows you to focus on one or more lines at a time, enable a picture dictionary, or translate the page into a different language.

I have no doubt that students will be distracted when they are first introduced to the tool. Even I got a little off-task trying to hear words read to me in different voices. But once students have explored it, and have it available to them at all times, the novelty should wear off, and students can use Immersive Reader to enhance their learning. To de-stigmatize its use, I would encourage all of my students to learn how to use it, so that it becomes as normalized as grabbing a dictionary off the shelf. (Okay, that’s probably not as normal anymore, but I think you get the picture.)

For some more ways that Immersive Reader can be used, including other apps that support it, I recommend reading this article, “3 Ways to Support Your Students Using Immersive Reader,” from Ditch That Textbook.

K-12, Teaching Tools, Universal Design for Learning

UDL for Remote Classrooms

Terri Eichholz

My latest post for the NEO blog is, Applying Universal Design for Learning in Remote Classrooms.   I know that many educators are still concerned about what the beginning of the new school year will bring, but this article will give you many helpful tools regardless of your upcoming situation.  Universal Design for Learning is all about creating lessons effectively and efficiently for all students.  One of the first videos that I watched when I went to Harvard one summer for UDL training is the Todd Rose TED Talk I’ve embedded below.  It embodies the philosophy behind UDL – where we stop designing schools for “average,” and begin designing “to the edges.”  Take a look at the video, and then hop on over to my article for specific ways to apply UDL to distance learning.

My previous NEO articles have been: How Distance Learning Fosters Global Collaboration, How to Use Design Thinking in the Classroom, and How to S.T.E.A.M. Up Distance Learning.

Education, Universal Design for Learning

The Myth of Average

Terri Eichholz

I was reading a book by Ken Robinson the other day that reminded me of this video.  I knew I had posted the video on my blog at some point, but didn’t realize that it was three years ago.  It definitely bears making an encore appearance.

In this TEDx Talk by Todd Rose, you will hear the astounding story of how the Air Force discovered that designing for the “average” pilot can be debilitating.

Apply this to schools, as Todd Rose does, and you can see why – by trying to help the greatest numbers, we end up helping the least.

The video is 18 minutes long, but well worth watching all of the way through.

Design to the Edges

5-8, 6-12, Critical Thinking, Education, Language Arts, Social Studies, Student Products, Teaching Tools, Universal Design for Learning, Websites

iCivics Drafting Board

Terri Eichholz

It’s been awhile since I’ve visited the iCivics site.  You can see my last post about it here (2012!).  The site, founded by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, offers interactives, games, and lesson plans for learning about civics.  And it’s all free!

There is a lot of curriculum available on the site, and teachers can log in and add students to a class, giving them assignments that the teachers can then monitor.  One of the tools that looks really great for 5th graders and up is the Drafting Board tool.  This is a robust, thought-provoking interactive that leads students through steps that result in crafting a persuasive essay.  I’ve embedded the iCivics  introductory video to Drafting Board below.  This PDF thoroughly explains how to use the tool.

iCivicsDraftingBoard

There are several things that appeal to me about Drafting Board.  It scaffolds the process of writing a persuasive essay based on evidence very well.  The teacher has the capability of differentiating the assignment by choosing different “challenge levels” for students. Though there is a lot of reading involved, all of the passages have accompanying audio for students who need that support.  These features make this a great UDL resource.

One of the lessons is about whether or not 16-year-olds should be given the right to vote – a topic that is frequently brought up by my students. (Actually, they think “all kids” should have the right to vote.)  Another one that would tie in very well with my 5th grade unit on The Giver is the question of whether or not students should be required to do volunteer work in order to graduate.

Even if you don’t have access to 1-to-1 devices for your students, Drafting Board would be a valuable whole-class lesson, or even a center for groups of students, inviting an educated discourse about controversial topics.