Ed Tech Tips with E. Mosier

Now that Halloween is upon us, we can think about activities to do that involve technology and celebrate all aspects of the holiday. There are several ways that we can incorporate technology into a Halloween-themed lesson. We can do this with designing pumpkins, or shifting a regular classroom activity to include pumpkins. Each of the lesson ideas below can be quickly inserted into lesson plans to celebrate the day, all the while still adhering to aligning with certain standards for the curriculum. All of these activities are easy to do in class, and can even be utilized in a way to allow students a study or brain break, or as an activity once all other work is completed.

My favorite activity to do for Halloween is the Build a Jack-o-Lantern in Slides activity developed by Eric Curts. For this activity, students are presented with a blank pumpkin and a text box on the first slide. Then, on the next few slides, are parts that can be used to design their pumpkin. Once finished, they can write about their Jack-o-Lantern, by giving it a name, a personality, and maybe even telling you why their pumpkin is designed the way it was! Mote is an extension that would allow students to add sound, narrate the slides, or even add some cool sound effects for it! This activity is great for all levels. I've done this activity with a variety of grade levels, from 4th grade to college students and each age has had so much fun doing it!

Another one of my favorite activities is the Halloween Magnetic Poetry. Growing up, you probably rearranged magnetic letters on a fridge a time or two to make words or sentences, or to just have some fun. But, Kasey Bell from Shake Up Learning, has created that activity in a digital sense for you to use with her Halloween Magnetic Poetry. In the Slides template, there are over 100 pre-made words related to Halloween. Students will then drag and drop them in the space provided to make poems. Additionally, once again, Eric Curts has done a great job with his template. It's similar, but contains quite a few more words and opportunities for students. Try these out with your students, as these activities have the potential to reach students at several grade levels!

As always, John Sowash at the Chromebook Classroom developed a couple of really neat activities. Using Google Slides for activities that aren't Slides presentations is incredible. He's developed a template to Carve Your Own Pumpkin using Google Slides. So, save yourself the mess and have a little fun carving some digital pumpkins in your classroom. Another activity that can be done for upper grades and allows for more autonomy in their learning is a Halloween Choice Board.On this pre-made template, students can choose whichever activity they would like. From a Halloween Crossword to a Coding activity, there's something that will interest any student.

There are not a lot of better reasons to celebrate Halloween than the ridiculously high volume of candy that comes with it. Especially when you become a parent and know that not only is the "dad tax" a real thing, there's plenty of candy to go around. Eric Curts at Control Alt Achieve, a former middle school math teacher, has created an activity to use Google Sheets and Skittles to be really engaging. The goal of this activity is to work on estimating, counting, comparing, and even graphing of these fun candies. Check out his blog post, make a copy of the template and have a "sweet" activity to participate in with your students.

In keeping with the Halloween theme, there's a cool activity that was created by Kyle Niemis, who works at Quizizz. He's created a Halloween-themed Escape room that can be combined with any Quizizz quiz to amplify the enjoyment of your classroom. If you're feeling ambitious, since it's in Quizizz, you're able to create your own meme set to use with the Quizizz quiz to engage students even further. This looks like an awesome game that combines a few enjoyable Halloween tech-related activities!

Even though the Table of Contents feature has been a staple of a Google Doc for quite some time, Google has recently started rolling out document tabs in Docs. These "super-charged tables of contents" allow you to break larger Docs into much smaller sections. The main difference is that an icon can be applied to each "tab," making it much easier to navigate and allows for a more visually appealing interface. If you have yet to notice this in your Doc, it won't take long before it shows up and you can take full use of this neat feature!

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Email: mosiere@davenportschools.org
Website: sudlow.davenportschools.org
Location: Sudlow Intermediate School, East Locust Street, Davenport, IA, United States
Phone: 563-445-5150
Twitter/X: @emosier3