Using Jamboard for Speech Sessions

Are you looking for more ways to work on those tricky skills, keep your students engaged, but not spend so many hours planning and preparing for in? Today I want to share with you one of my favorite tools called Jamboard. It is a Google app that you can access in the waffle grid where you would go to get to your Google Drive, Google Meet, etc. Jamboard is basically an interactive whiteboard feature and it is great if you're using Google meet or Zoom because it has so many helpful features that are even better than the built-in writing tool in Zoom. On Jamboard you can do quick graphic organizers, visual aids, quick activities and you can share them with your students and everyone can be looking at the same screen and moving things around and doing things together. You can use it for instruction or your whole group can be doing something collaboratively. Here is an example of a Venn diagram where the students would be comparing and contrasting and I placed words on the little yellow stick-it's so that the students can move around the words into the right sections of the diagram. Here is another example of a chart I love to use with my students. This is a KWL chart and the students will write what they know before the activity, what they want to know, and then what they learned after the activity. I love to pair this with nonfiction texts or Mystery Doug videos. When doing activities like this, it makes it so easy to work with a whole group of kids because everyone can be filling in the chart at the same time and it really helps to be able to see what everyone is doing and there is no question if someone is able to see the screen or if you can see what they are writing. Another example of something you could do is make a word web with pictures. The students can move pictures around on the screen to make a word web to go along with a text or video that you are using. This is a nice option for students who maybe don’t know how to read or spell many things yet. You could embed pictures to tell everything they know about a topic. Another thing I like about Jamboard is that you can have multiple slides stored and ready to go. So, you can use it for just one session or you can have them ready to use a different one with each group for the entire day. This tool is so great for virtual groups because often we have so many different tabs open and we are trying to tell if the students are looking at it. When I use Google slides there is more of a lag time and sometimes my students aren’t really sure of how to move things. But here on Jamboard, when I use the sticky notes it is so easy and clear for my students how to move things or they can use the writing tool to just write in their answer. It is so user friendly and my students love it. There are so many possibilities of what you can do with Jamboard. Everything from social skills to comic strips to descriptions etc. You can pull in any of your students' interests and get them excited about coming to speech. I have been using this tool more and more especially this year with more and more of my students going virtual. I love the ease of use and flexibility this tool offers and I would love to see how you use Jamboard with your students! Want to learn more? Check out the video and this Jamboard resource I mentioned for engaging, no-prep and low-prep activities to use with your students this week!