I’ve always enjoyed teaching the present progressive to my students because it comes as a breath of fresh air after focusing on the preterite and imperfect. I never spend a lot of time on it because it is more rarely used, but the unit is always a nice break from the complications of other verb tenses. During in-person instruction, I love to practice the tense by using fun, crazy pictures. Students get super creative when building their sentences and it is a great way to review verbs. My students always enjoy searching out the strangest things happening in the pictures and feel accomplished after describing them.
This year though, I taught the present progressive virtually and was struggling to translate those activities to the virtual setting. When one day it hit me: use a Jamboard. I’d been using Jamboards for a variety of activities but hadn’t thought to use it with pictures. I decided I wanted a distinct picture on each frame of the Jamboard so I went to work searching out a variety of pictures. By having a different picture on each frame it would be harder for students to mix up which frame they should be on and then if one group exhausted their original picture I could send them to another. I created this pinterest board with pictures and found this treasure trove of a website.
Once I had the pictures, I set to work downloading the ones I wanted and then uploading them to the Jamboard as the frame background. I’d had issues with my students accidentally deleting parts of my Jamboard activities, so by clicking on “set background” and then the “image” option, I safeguarded my pictures from being deleted. Each frame also has a sticky note for students to write their names on so I can make sure breakout rooms find their correct frame and that they are working on the task at hand. One important thing about using this activity with breakout rooms, is that you need to keep breakout room 1 empty so that the frame numbers match the breakout room numbers. I love that I can send all my students to the same Jamboard and then flip through the frames to check on each group’s progress. Here is the final product.
This activity worked great with my students! They found the pictures engaging and amusing and got right to work creating text boxes or sticky notes to describe the actions taking place in their picture. For groups that worked quickly, there were extra pictures at the end for them to move onto and for the slower groups, there was plenty happening in the picture to keep them busy!
I think the best thing about this activity is that I now have something that I can use again in the future! There is no reason this couldn’t be used for other verb tenses or certain pictures couldn’t be curated for a specific vocabulary list. This will also easily transition well to an in-person classroom. It is nice to know that not everything I’m creating this year is just a one and done activity.
