Make Your Lessons More Sticky!

Post-It notes, or sticky notes, are a great way to develop learning - and they can still be used in the COVID-proofed classroom and online!

I LOVE a Post-It Note lesson.

I can still recall trying to justify my order for 5,000 Post-Its to my school's finance department years ago.

Post-Its in the traditional classroom

Students can jot down ideas in response to a question - a different idea on each note. They can note down advantages / disadvantages, again one per note.

You can then get students to pair up with someone else, remove "duplicated" ideas, and then "snowball" that approach with another pair, again duplicated ideas are removed.

Take it a step further and then move the notes around to "rank" them from most useful/relevant to least useful/relevant. It's always great to see so much discussion and learning going on.

So what about COVID?

Each educational institution has their own slightly different approach to the "Covid-safe" classroom. It might be that your students, in their "bubble", can touch each other's notes after using hand-sanitiser. Or maybe they can't, but they can sit next to each other and just touch their own notes (perhaps use different colours so it's obvious whose is whose!).

Maybe they're allowed to get up and move around a bit - so why not stick them on a wall or window, and get them out of their seats for a bit?

The beauty of this is that you, as the teacher, can stay safely behind your "safe line" at the front of the room and let your students learn together.

Post-Its in the online classroom

You don't need to leave out the students who might be learning at home. Here are some ideas on how to integrate them into the same learning activity.

The team that actually invented the sticky note have developed the Post-It App - it looks fantastic! The app allows you to take a photo, with your smartphone camera, of up to 200 Post-Its in one go. You can then convert handwriting on the physical notes to editable text. And you can move those notes around electronically! The techie notes on the website state that it works on any device and operating system, and that boards can be worked on collaboratively.

A lower-tech solution is the simple "online sticky note", where you start with online notes rather than being able to combine with physical notes. There's a Microsoft version, a Chrome add-in version, or this Simple Sticky Note version.