Hyperdocs in the Classroom
For those of you who didn't know, I taught Social Studies. One of the classes I taught was U.S. History 3070. Once second semester came, I had to find new ways to engage my students, because the course was becoming too much of the same. Let's face it. Despite our best efforts, more often than not, our planning can result in something that ends up being very teacher centered, because it's the easiest or we fall into the trap of teaching the same way over and over.
This is where I discovered hyperdocs. If you've never heard of a hyperdoc, it is a digital document which contains a lesson or series of lessons that is very student focused. The lessons are contained in one document and students take part on a learning journey.
Here are some other examples:
Cult of Pedagogy has written this excellent article about hyperdocs. This articles goes into more detail about the benefits, uses and best practices. There are several resources linked to the article.
From my experience, I would say building it was time consuming. (I also went a little bananas and made mine half of unit. This is not necessary 😊). However, once it was done, I had time to work with students. I could walk around and facilitate class. I was able to differentiate for my students needs. I also felt like I had so much time, to work with kids, which wasn't the norm for me.
The high achieving students worked on enrichment activities, which brought the learning to another depth and kept them feeling challenged. My more reluctant students could do the required work and still feel challenged. Students in the middle ended up going both ways. Instead of sit and get, my students were doing the thinking, which is what we want, right?!
Here is a Google Drive folder of several templates you can use to create your own hyperdoc for class. Please let me know how I can help you! This was one of the most fun units I had, because I got spend so much time with my students through the learning.
Comments
Post a Comment