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Monday 20 June 2011

Spice up your lessons with educational jigsaw puzzles


There are many good ways how to enliven your lessons with attractive elements, for instance, using jigsaw puzzles. These puzzles can be created and played online. Not only younger students but also older ones might enjoy a fun activity with serious learning content which is supplied by the teacher.


The Jigsaw Planet website lets you create a puzzle using an image of your choice and save it for playing it online privately or publicly. The puzzles are embeddable as you can see in the example below. You will need Java to make it work.

Teaching about social media

I used a picture with different logos of social sites to discuss the topic of social media at the lesson. When the students have done the puzzle, you can ask them which sites they recognize, which sites they are using and which ones are completely new to them. Then go on talking about the less known sites and social media phenomenon in general.

You can embed the whole puzzle on your website or your Moodle site but I am not doing it here not to slow down the traffic.
Click on the puzzle or the title to go to the website and play it online.


previewSocial Media






As the next step ask your students to do the second puzzle where I have used the definition of social media turned into an image which is used to create a puzzle. This puzzle is more difficult because the students have to read and try to put the words and sentences together.


previewDefinition of Social Media



When the students have done the second puzzle, you can read and discuss the definition of social media and proceed with your teaching or homework as you find necessary.

You can successfully apply the flipped classroom principle to this activity asking your students to do the puzzles at home and come to the lesson ready for discussions and reviews.
 

1 comment:

Wooden Puzzles said...

I like your ideas in this article. You have an insightful view of the topic and I concur. This is a delightful piece of writing.