Engage Learners with Ryan O'Donnell's Bevy of Templates

Whether it is a template to edit of a mock Time cover and article or it is a fake social media profile to doctor, the Templates section of Rocklin, California media-arts teacher Ryan O'Donnell's CreativeEdtech.Weebly.com is sure to hold a number of engaging activities you will find your kids can't enough of editing.

As part of my upcoming "25 Insanely Great Ways to Use Keynote" presentation at next week's MACUL conference, I wanted to include the George Washington Time template Ryan generously shares on his site. He creates them in Google Slides, but they can be downloaded and then used with PowerPoint or Keynote.

The main instructional idea behind the templates is that any content can be used for students to show their knowledge in a way far more creative than the standard typed report. Besides this George Washington one, there are a number of other magazine templates as well as some very clever social media profiles and posts templates.

During the #CreateWtihChrome holiday advent calendar that Ryan, Brian Briggs, Jen Giffin, and I hosted, Ryan created a template challenge. I chose to do a Twitter profile for fictional baseball player Crash Davis, from the marvelous movie Bull Durham. 

It was a lot of fun to go through the exercise and really analyze four characters from what is often correctly heralded as the greatest baseball movie ever made. It made me think about the depth of knowledge this activity would elicit from high schoolers analyzing a novel like To Kill a Mockingbird.

Check out Ryan's templates and lots of other great offerings at his website CreativeEdTech.Weebly.com.