Jamboard Series Part V: 10 MORE Ways to Use Jamboard in the Classroom

As more teachers have discovered Jamboard, I’ve picked up a few more examples of creative and innovative ways to use it in the classroom. If there’s anything I’m missing feel free to drop me a line! I’d love to hear about how you are using Jamboard too.

(If you’re not already familiar with Jamboard, start here; and if you are confused about the different versions of Jamboard available for your device, check this post out.)

10 MORE ways to use Jamboard in your classroom.

Venn Diagrams

Using an inserted Venn Diagram image from Google Images, or create one by layering two circles from the shape recognition feature. Students can quickly compare and contrast any number of subjects in fun and creative ways. They can display characteristics in images, autodraw pictures, sticky notes, and emojis.

Visual Sentences

A great activity for younger students who are still learning grammar basics. Put a couple example sentences on the Jamboard (i.e. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog) and ask your students to replace all the nouns with autodraw images, or replace all the verbs with Google images, or draw symbols for each preposition.

Additionally, you could ask students to translate an entire sentence into images and symbols, and then have the class try to decipher the meaning.

Discussion Boards

I’ve written an entire blog post about how to use the Sticky Note feature on a shared Jamboard as a Padlet style discussion board, check it out here.

Annotating Slides

One of the coolest features of Jamboard is it allows you to insert Drive files onto a Jam. By taking a couple of minutes to place one presentation slide per Jam slide, you could give an interactive presentation where you add text and images to your slides as you present. When you are finished, you can then save and share the file with your students.

Students might use copies of your presentation simply as reference material for studying, but you could also leave places within your presentation that ask students to review the presentation and answer questions. Using the ‘make a copy for each student’ function on Google Classroom, you can turn your direct instruction presentation into an independent practice assignment the minute you finish presenting the material.

Video Presentation Tool

Using Jamboard and a Screen recording tool, like Screencastify, could turn Jamboard presentations into instructional or informative videos.

8 Part Stories

8 PArt Stories are a great Language Arts activity from EduProtocols, and Jamboard would be a great delivery format.

Labeling a Map

Insert a blank map from Google Images, and ask students to label it. Or, ask students to label it with color coordinated sticky notes. Or, ask students to label it with Autodrawings or Google images that represent the place culturally, historically or gastronomically.

Graphing Equations

Again, plot points could be images, drawings, or color coded sticky notes. More fun, and with the shape recognition feature, straight lines are much easier!

Creative Thinking - Workbench

Workbench was recently acquired by Google, and has since been built out with some handy Google Specific lessons, including a whole host of lessons on using Jamboard for creative and divergent thinking.

Expert Teacher Demo (Via Hangout)

Know a teacher who does an amazing lesson on apostrophes? Or area of a triangle? Or the Gettysburg Address? Have them join your classroom via Google Hangouts and watch their presentation on Jamboard.

Google recently updated Jamboard to enable the presenter to choose to share their device screen, Jamboard Screen, and the presenter can now become the full screen for larger displayed video chatting.