I often blog about my bad days or my short-comings or my learning reflections (often about social media). Today I am writing to share my awesome day!
I decided to change my Library Orientation into a Breakout EDU. A few teacher-librarians I know had done this, Thanks (Nikki Robertson & Shauna Young for sharing). Last year, I was brand-new and advised to keep Orientation as is (I did make it mine and added a Kahoot), but I was not happy with it at all.
My goals?
Introduce students to the services and resources I offer in the Library by allowing them to DISCOVER these through fun, interactive challenges. So I hid puzzles in books, created posters with hidden clues and got them to answer questions on a Google Form which revealed their word-combination when they submitted the form. It was a really nice mix of traditional and digital Breakout components. I am not going to lie, I was super nervous. You see, unlike a classroom teacher, I have no real rapport with these students coming into the Library. I don’t know their names or their learning needs.
I used two boxes (so really I created 2 different but similar games) and was very explicit about the fact that everyone had to participate and that students could not go to the next lock before helping everyone else along. Literally every student was working on it. I was giddy! There was such a positive energy and such great collaboration. Some of the students I thought I might have to prod to participate, completely surprised me!
It provided an entry point for a variety of different learners, got them out of their seats, and then back on task, and at the end of the time, they felt the exhilaration of success (and got a lollipop 🙂 )
Day 1 of Gr.9 @breakoutEDU library orientation a success! pic.twitter.com/hDZgVDPk7T
— Cardinal Carter CHS (@ccarterchs) September 13, 2017
Here is what Group A clues looked like.
How often do students thank you at the end of a class? Well, today, the whole class thanked me, and several students came up to me separately to thank me.
At the end, I made a point of asking them questions about what they learned and I would say it was equal, if not MORE than the learning shared last year during a web-search-type Orientation.
Here is a post I wrote several years ago: Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: Escape Room in Education, which is the most viewed ever on my website. It is still as relevant today as it was then.
If you haven’t tried Breakout EDU or Breakout EDU digital, you definitely need to!
