Jigsaw Activities with Google Slides

I'm sure we have all had experience doing jigsaw reading -- my first experience with it, believe it or not, was when I was working on my master's degree. I remember thinking it had some pros and cons -- I liked that a long reading was broken up between multiple people so I didn't have to read as much, but I also didn't like it when I was responsible for reading something in the middle of an article but didn't always have the context needed to make full sense of what I was reading because I didn't read the information before my assigned section.

You can take the best part of a jigsaw activity and use it in your class effectively and easily with Google Slides! Think of it as crowd-sourcing for education! Here's an example of how it can be used:

Let's say you want your students to learn about the life cycle of a plant. You can easily break students up into groups and assign each group one part of the life cycle. That group researches their topic and they become "experts" in that aspect. Then each group is given one slide of a Google Slides slide deck and they put the information about their assigned part of the life cycle on the slide. When each group is done, you have a complete resource on the entirety of the life cycle that can be used by all students in the class.

This is something that can be done across grade levels and subject areas!

• Literature: events that take place in each stage of the plot of a story or novel
• Grammar: students create sample sentences demonstrating different uses of comma rules
• Social studies: complete a study of a country -- geography, industry, history, culture, climate, etc.
• Math: students explain the steps for completing a problem at the top of the slide
• Science: students research inventors and their inventions -- one slide per inventor/invention
• Music: students share YouTube videos of different composers' music
• Art: students share images that depict different styles of art -- abstract, impressionism, still life, etc.
• P.E.: students crate a warm-up routine for the start of class; put the exercise on a slide then run the slide show at the start of class for students to follow

Most of the hard work has been done for you already, too! I found this great template that you can use, too!

Have you done something like this already, or are you planning to now? I'd love it if you'd share in the comments below!