PosterMyWall live class: Run engaging classroom projects

Are you excited for the new school year to start? In this week’s live class, educational technology consultant Beatrice Gonzalez, a.k.a. YouTube’s Mrs. Talktechie, shared examples of engaging classroom projects you can run on PosterMyWall. She also led a hands-on demo of how you can create a project and share it with your students on an external learning management system.

If you missed the class, watch the replay. Or, if you prefer, read on for a summary of Bea’s presentation. 

Classroom projects on PosterMyWall

Solutions for educators and staff

As an educator, you need to come up with fun and creative ways to engage your students. However, you also don’t always have the time to create instructional materials from scratch. 

The easy solution to this challenge is to use PosterMyWall to find a template you like and quickly and simply customize it to create your content. This not only facilitates instruction, but also does so in a visually exciting way. 

For instance, let’s say you want to create a poster listing COVID protocols that students should follow. Simply pick a template, customize it to add your own spin, and share it with your class.

Customization allows you to create teaching tools that jive with your personal teaching style and tactics.

Add collaborators

If you want to collaborate with other members of your staff such as coaches or counsellors, you can do that by adding collaborators to your project in PosterMyWall. Adding collaborators and sharing designs in PosterMyWall is fast and easy. This approach is ideal if you’re making a weekly or a monthly newsletter and you want other teachers and department heads to contribute. 

Add QR codes

Another feature that educators might find useful is the option to add QR codes to your designs. Instead of making your designs visually clunky by adding all of the information, simply add a QR code that takes your students to the additional information you want them to know. You can also use a QR Code to link to an email address or contact form. This is helpful if you want to answer parents’ questions or gather feedback.

Create anchor charts

Anchor charts are central to an educator’s job. They help students understand and remember your lessons. PosterMyWall templates make it fast and easy to create anchor charts for everything you want your class to remember from the names of the planets to chemistry formulas. And by making your own anchor chart, you’ll have a tool that fits your unique teaching style.

Once you’ve made your anchor chart, you can download it in high resolution and print it out at whatever size you like. Or take it to your local print shop and have them create a durable poster by printing onto corrugated plastic. Mount your poster in your classroom so your kids see it everyday. Eventually, the information will be at their fingertips, so to speak. 

For students

Students use a wide range of digital devices to work on their online assignments. PosterMyWall allows you to work with any screen size or operating system, so your students can use it to work on their projects regardless of whether they’re working on a Mac laptop or an Android phone. 

Bea said that PosterMyWall makes it easy to make learning visible to your students with visual aids and assignments. If you create a classroom account, your students can work on classroom assignments within PosterMyWall and engage with class content in an effective way. 

Here’s the big advantage of working in this manner. It allows all students to unleash their creativity – even those who are not good at making art. Here are some examples of classroom projects students can work on:

• Turn a passage you read in class into a book cover 

• Make a poster telling the class about yourself

• Create a protest poster that shows the causes of the American Revolution

• Complete a paragraph writing activity 

Share via your learning management system

A lot of schools have been using online learning management systems. This will likely continue, even after the pandemic, because of how convenient it is. 

It’s fast and easy to share projects you’ve created with PosterMyWall via your online learning system. For instance, you can download your project from PosterMyWall, then add it as a background on Jamboard in Google Classroom. Kids will then be able to fill out the required answers and submit the work online.

Make a classroom project 

Step 1: Choose a template you like. For her tutorial, Bea used the one shown below. 

Step 2: Resize your project for Google Slides or Google Classroom, depending on how you’re going to share the project. For Google Slides, the recommended dimensions are 16×9.

Step 3: Move and resize the elements on the template to suit your needs and preferences. Add questions and headings where appropriate. 

Step 4: Adjust the font type and font size, if you like. You can also add fun clip art to make your project more engaging for students. Bea uses the Bitmoji Chrome extension to add exciting, personalized Bitmojis to the project. 

Step 5: Download the finished project. Bea’s finished project looked something like this. 

Step 6: Go to your learning management system. Let’s assume you’re using Jamboard by Google Classroom. Set the project up as a background so kids can write and past images on top of your design.

And there you go. You’ve just created a fun and educational learning experience for your students. You’ll find many templates that can be transformed into teaching aids on PosterMyWall–as well as templates that can be customized to create other useful materials including newsletters, certificates, and planners. 

With PosterMyWall, you can get a classroom account for your entire class. Check out our demo on how you can run entire student projects within PosterMyWall.

So get started today and, like Bea, make your classroom a fun learning place for your students.