Presence Activity with Students

After being challenged to create an activity for my classes that lets them apply their learning in a more humorous or fun way, I decided to have my students create government memes. We were talking about different types of government and who was in charge for each already in class and instead of my old review, I wanted to try something new. Students were broken into small groups and drew one of the types of government that we talked about in class. Then they were required to make a meme that alluded to their type of government without using the actual word so we could quiz ourselves on them.

This was to serve as a way for them to review who was in charge of making decisions and how each government actually functioned after we talked about them in class. My hopes and dreams were that this would be something quick and fun for students to do - as memes are huge with a lot of 8th graders and I wanted to find something that would take less time than my past review activity which involved them creating their own island government and then classifying it.

This allowed my students to incorporate some creativity into their review and some critical thinking about which meme base and what text would best convey the type of government that they had.

Overall, it went decent......there were definitely some major challenges. I had found a meme making site on my laptop that I thought worked at school......it didn't on the kids ipads. So my first hour we ended up trying it and then just skipping it and moving on because I had blocked out over half the class to do it and it wasn't working(thank god for having the next thing prepped and ready). Over lunch, I quickly figured out my backup plan which was this teacher created meme template that utilized a google drawing template to create a meme from teacher chosen pictures. Students would just drag the one they wanted and then add text and be good, right? Wrong. We tried it with my next hour and they couldn't seem to drag the photos on their ipad(grrrrr). But, in that hour, one of my students was able to find a meme generator that worked so we ended up using that and actually was able to create some for the rest of the day. We had some really good ones that made some really good connections and I had some students who were really confused as to how a meme worked.

I think in the future, if I used memes again I would find an easier way for them to be able to make them on their ipads(and have my advisory kids test the website to make sure it worked - that way I would have my prep to fix it if necessary). I think I would also show them some examples of what I was looking for to help clarify for those who don't know what memes are or how they work.

However, this was a kinda cool way to get them to apply the knowledge and I did have a vast majority of my students get pretty into it - especially my meme boys who traditionally are not into doing work which was kinda cool. But definitely learned to test sites with my advisory kids and not just my staff laptop.......