Brainstorming using Jamboard for remote teaching

Jamboard is great for brainstorming that allows students to work collaboratively on gathering ideas, sorting them by colour, organising them in different frames, moving them together, drawing lines to connect important ideas, etc. The following video demonstrates how to create a brainstorming activity using Jamboard.

The objectives of this activity are to:

• Generate a number of ideas
• Focus students’ attention on a particular topic
• Provide an opportunity for students to process and share ideas and expand their existing knowledge by building on each other’s contributions

• Google Jamboard (Be aware Jamboard is not currently a supported technology at UTS).
• Canvas

This activity should be used in online learning sessions like Zoom and Teams meetings. It should be introduced early in the module.

Tips

Remember to include adequate details in Canvas about the activity, such as how to access the Jamboard and the purpose of the activity. It is good practice to send students an introductory message to the online session via Canvas Inbox message, which will also be sent to students’ emails. This is to let your students know what to expect and allow them to prepare for the session in advance. You may also include details explaining the goal of the session (i.e. the problem and the solution students should be seeking), any supporting material, the agenda, links to relevant tools or resources, calendar event, and the meeting invite (e.g. Zoom link).

The need for new interactive teaching tools has been dramatically amplified during the shift to online learning. Jamboard is among the popular tools that academics have utilised in remote teaching for different activities, such as collaborative learning, creating summaries, ideation and brainstorming.  

It has also been utilised widely in post-secondary education such as in social sciences and medical sciences (Sweeney, et. al, 2021).

Remembering knowledge is the first level of learning in the cognitive domain in Bloom’s Taxonomy. As the lowest order thinking skill, remembering is defined as the ability to recall previously learned information and involves intellectual skills and abilities required for learning, thinking critically, and problem solving. Once students are engaged in previously acquired knowledge they gradually start to clarify concepts and make connections. They can also paraphrase a point, or compare and contrast information.

Jamboard can be a useful tool to mediate students’ engagement in activities targeting memory and comprehension skills, where they recall previous knowledge and contribute to one shared place. Using a shared whiteboard requires students to engage in organisation and reorganisation of a problem, i.e. finding the appropriate clues that will activate whatever knowledge is filled or stored.

This takes them to the next level of Bloom’s Taxonomy, which is Understanding. Students start to explain ideas and concepts, discuss and describe a topic in detail, explain what it means, recognise it and translate the facts in some way. 

Knowledge and development of intellectual skills are at the heart of the cognitive domain of Bloom’s taxonomy and using a tool such as Jamboard can help with achieving the learning objectives of the thinking skills.

References

Sweeney, E. M., Beger, A. W., & Reid, L. (2021). Google Jamboard for virtual anatomy education. The Clinical Teacher.