HyperDocs and HyperSlides Create Student Choice
By: Matt Rhoads, Ed.D
Dr. Matt Rhoads is a Tech and Instructional Leader and Innovator with hands in Adult Ed, K-12, and Higher Education. He is the author of several books and is the host of Navigating Education – The Podcast.
HyperDocs and HyperSlides can be utilized to create student tasks and assignments that promote choice and student agency. Additionally, they can help improve the efficiency of your lesson planning by being utilized as templates time and time again for your lessons. Last, they can boost student engagement, creativity, and innovation as it provides them with the choice to add their own elements to the final work product.
Overall, the goal of this post is to show you how to create your own student choiceboard using Google Docs and Slides. However, before we begin, a few quick notes about choiceboards will be provided.
First, before utilizing chocieboards, we need to teach our students how to analyze the content we provide them as well as how to take the content and create something out of it. Creation applications such as using Flipgrid for podcasts, Canva for infographics, and writing a blog post using Google Docs, must be taught over the course of the first month or so of class so students know how to use them before taking on student choice tasks. We can scaffold this over time by providing several tasks over the first month of class that require students to create their own podcast, blog post, or infographic. If this is done beforehand, we can have successful student choice tasks provided to them in a manner that can be successful.
Second, much of the creation process requires a bit of research. For the content you want your students to evaluate first, this will take you the longest to research while setting up your choice board. For the steps relating to evaluating and synthesizing the content and creating a student work product demonstrating their learning for the final step, the same tasks students interact with can be very similar throughout the choice boards you create each semester.
Now, let’s focus on building a choice board!
Choiceboard Using Google Docs – How-To Steps
Here are the following steps to create a choiceboard using Google Docs. Following these steps is a detailed video on how to create them using Google Docs. Let’s do this!
Step 1: Create a table with three columns. Label them Step 1, 2, and 3. Step 1 is Content,
Step 2 is a task for students to synthesize the content they’ve analyzed, which is typically a graphic organizer, and Step 3 is a task related to students creating something that demonstrates what they’ve learned and/or a problem solving task.
Step 3: For each column, provide two to three choices for your students.
Step 4: Hyperlink the content you would like your students to click on for the choiceboard. For Step 1, the content can be easily linked from the internet. However, for Steps 2 and 3, you must generally make an assignment on Canvas that you can then hyperlink to the choiceboard. This will help you grade student work and keep them accountable for completing the choiceboard tasks.
Step 5: Post the choice board on Canvas or send out via email or a link to your students.
Here is an additional choicboard template you can use from EdTechPicks.org for your to create a digital choice board on Google Docs.
Google Slide Choiceboard
In a similar manner, you can create a choiceboard using Google Slides using the same steps. Essentially, the same steps are followed, but the content of the choices presented on the choiceboard are slides embedded within the slide presentation. On each of these slides, students complete a task that is associated with the choiceboard. It may include links and instructions required for the assignment to be completed. The major area that differentiates is the hyperlinks. Instead of linking content outside of the slides to the choiceboard front page, you will hyperlink each slide, which then can be utilized as a platform to hyperlink content related to that specific task (click on the image of the Google Slide below to see an example).
- Watch this video on how to Create An Interactive Choice Board Using Google Slides to see how it’s done!
Note: Click here to view the HyperSlide. Thanks for Slidemania for template!
Conclusion on Choiceboards
Choiceboards provide a great opportunity for students to analyze and synthesize content and then create something creative and innovative demonstrating what they have learned. Also, it provides teachers with an efficient and effective way to plan and deliver lessons. Additional resources have been provided regarding the choiceboards below. Check them out and please feel free to use the many templates provided throughout the article!
Additional Resources on Creating Student Choice Boards Using Google Docs and Slides
Navigating the Present and Future of Education 