How can I make my command terms a little more engaging and accessible?

I’ve long loved Haiku Deck as an application to create stunning visual slideshows quickly.  Recently this application went from freeware to pay, so some people may want another alternative.

An easy way to make ‘Haiku Deck-like’ slides is with two Google Slides Add-ons:

Unsplash photos

Extensis Fonts

The wonderful news about Unsplash photos is that they are all under a creative commons license–and every time we use them, we model fair use with students (more on that here).

The Econs team asked for a little help sprucing up their command terms, and using the add-ons here is the final result:

So what, now what?

The Econs team may want to consider incorporating Pear Deck as a way to engage with these terms (see my full Pear Deck tutorial here).

Alternatively, they could have students use the slides as a starting point for a screencast where they explore course week from that month, and explain where and when they put a variety of command terms into action.  This could be used as a provocation for a digital portfolio post to be shared across Econs classrooms (or even from East to Dover!). To go about producing that screencast, students may want to explore this tutorial on Loom.

Perhaps students could audit a playlist from The Economist’s Youtube channel, hunting for authentic examples of these command terms at work.

Lastly, students could explore #IBEcon on Twitter (or this list of Econs educators) and curate tweets which model the use of a variety of command terms. If you are interested in learning how to save and curate tweets, here is another blast from the past. Any tweet can be embedded into a digital portfolio post, here’s how.