Are you looking to offer students choice in how to engage with content, demonstrate their learning, and liven up routines? Try creating a “Choice Board” in Seesaw! Choice boards are essentially graphic organizers comprised of images or other shapes that offer students choice in how to complete an instructional activity.
Choice boards have many powerful benefits. Not only does a choice board give students options in how to demonstrate their learning (meeting our Empowered Learner ISTE Standard), but it can also support student engagement in learning activities. Offering choice is an essential component of differentiation. It is critical that we support our students of all diverse learning styles through multiple modalities, and provide various scaffolds and templates during instruction. Through creating choice boards in Seesaw, we hope to provide students opportunities to take greater ownership over their own learning.
Choice Board Examples
There is no one way to create a choice board. Some teachers create the boards using slides, and add it to their Seesaw activity as a multimedia example or template. In these examples, students may be sent to external links to view articles, videos, or engage with information. This is a great option if the links are content-specific. Below is an example of a Polar Bear choice board by Kris Szajner, found via the link here. Students will select how to engage with the information about polar bears, and then reflect on the activity pages that follow.
Another content-specific choice board for intermediate students by Ed Tech TOSA Christin Bird (found via the link here) allows students to select either Three Little Pigs or Jack and the Beanstalk to explore from the lens of point of view. After viewing two read-aloud videos of the popular fairy-tale with differing points of view (read by the classroom teacher, and for classroom viewing only), students will reflect on how the point of view of the stories impacted their interpretation as a reader.
Others create the choice boards with simple shapes and icons directly in the Seesaw canvas to allow for choice in how to practice specific skills and strategies. This is a great option if you plan to use the choice board as a template that is revised for future skills practice. The content on each page can be changed for each activity, but the framework will stay consistent.
To create my choice board to help students practice foundational skills asynchronously, I created a front page with clickable shapes that would send students to the appropriate page for the desired activity.
Each activity page then had a button sending students back to the front page. In this example, each week students would be responsible for completing the different phonics pages (in whichever order they choose). Each day, they would save the activity as a draft and then submit at the end of the week!
However you choose to organize your choice board, students will be feel empowered to engage in their learning in various ways. Happy Seesaw-ing!
Want to Learn More about Choice Boards?
Check out these video tutorials:
Get the Foundational Skills Activity Link Here.
[…] Seesaw Practice Boards is a term that we have coined for these types of activities. They are similar to Seesaw choice boards, where students might select from various resources to explore a topic, or to demonstrate their learning. (You can read more about choice boards here). […]