UEN Teacher Tips

At this time of year, classrooms might feel less enthusiastic than at the beginning of the year. If you're looking for a quick way to bring back some energy, try using drawing as a formative assessment tool. Not only can students’ illustrations and diagrams provide important insights into their learning, but a growing body of research indicates that drawing can improve students’ engagement, vocabulary acquisition and understanding of key concepts and ideas. Nearpod's "Draw-It" tool is a great way to get started with integrating drawing into your lessons.

Here are five quick ideas—with examples—for utilizing Draw-It’s full potential: 

• Drawing from Scratch: Fire up a blank Draw-It whiteboard and give your students a prompt. Here are a few examples:
  • Draw a canyon and a valley. Draw arrows pointing out key differences between the two.
  • Draw a frog at each stage of its lifecycle.

• Using the Nearpod Library: Nearpod comes with hundreds of pre-made Draw-It activities. These are three of my favorites:
  • Creating Equivalent Fractions Using Area Models
  • Action Potential Stages

• Labeling Sentences and Images: Type a sentence or upload an image onto a Draw-It whiteboard, then ask your students to mark, circle and label. You might give one of these tasks:
  • Draw arrows on the river indicating which direction the water flows.
  • Color the bicep on the diagram blue, the tricep green and the deltoid red.

• Diagramming: Upload a T-Chart, timeline, or Venn Diagram as an image, or have students draw their own. Here are three things you might say:
  • Create a Venn Diagram comparing and contrasting the characteristics of reptiles and amphibians.
  • Create a timeline of the American Revolution. Include at least five key events.

• Draw the Missing Piece: Cover part of a map or diagram with a white circle or square and ask students to draw the missing element. This is what that might sound like:
  • Part of our equation’s graph is covered. Fill in the missing portion.
  • A piece of the car’s engine is missing from our diagram. Draw the missing piece.

Watch our 5-minute video to see how you can use Nearpod to bring life into your formative assessments.