Written by A couple of years ago I edited the numbers out of the National Geographic map provided by their MapKit website to make a giant floor map puzzle for the first day of school. I love this collaborative and break-the-ice activity, and usually, so do the kids. I’ve explored various avenues to make this a collaborative activity for remote learning including a bunch of puzzle websites that either limit you with the picture you can use or ones that max you out at 10 participants. I honestly spent a long time looking into this.
So I headed over to Google and tried Jamboard and Google Draw, but in the end decided that Google Slides was the best platform to currently carry out this lesson. It’s response time is almost immediate when you have multiple people working on it. I have two editions – a completed teacher’s edition and a mixed student edition. You will need to make a copy of both to your Google Drive first before sharing a link with students. If you have multiple sections of the course, you will want to create multiple versions, title them with your section number, and then share those links respectively.
One thing you need to keep in mind is that students will have the capability to accidentally delete the pieces and resize them. Hopefully this was done on accident, but you might want to remind them before starting that Google keeps a records of edits by user name to remind the devious ones 🙂 Theoretically, you can have the teacher’s edition open and copy paste the missing piece onto the student edition if you are able to tell which one went missing (most likely, closer to the end of the puzzle).
Remind students that they can resize their Google Slide screen between 50%-200% with the magnifying glass. This can help them see pieces that are hanging off the edge and to zoom in and see details.
Can students do this on their phone? Not advised. The puzzle pieces are small enough already that selecting a piece and dragging it will likely  distort the shapes. Look at my iPhone example below.
On the iPad using my home wifi, it took about a 45 seconds to 1 minute to load all of the pieces, but once I got going, it was as simple as tap and drag. You might also want to tell kids that in the event they accidentally resize a piece, they can immediately hit the redo arrow at the top to reset it. You can see my iPad example below.
Keep in mind that I can not guarantee this lesson’s success as it is untested, though with some clear instructions, I don’t see why you couldn’t pull this off. As with anything Google, it probably operates best in Chrome or their mobile Google Slides app. If you are Zooming your classes and students are calling in on one device, remember that you will see their faces go away as they float into Google Slides, but you should be able to see who is working on the puzzle in Google Slides. Heck, if you are watching from a desktop, you can even give them clues by dragging and dropping yourself. Unfortunately, we know that there is nothing like doing this in person and you will not get the same type of collaboration that you would if in the classroom, but if you are doing the talking and giving them clues about where Australia is on the map and telling them to pay attention to latitude and longitude lines, it will help break the silence.
If you want to see my original post for my traditional first day of school lesson plan, head over here.
Make copies of the original to your Google Drive and enjoy.
