Valentine’s Jamboard Activity

Last month, I tried out a Valentine’s Jamboard Activity with all of my classes to help show appreciation to the various teachers/school employees in our building.

We did this on a Friday after a week of being digital due to the ice/snowpocalypse. I thought it would be a nice change of pace from our daily dose of Delta Math.

Valentine’s Jamboard Activity

I created a different Jamboard for each hall/section of our school building. We have five different halls, so I created one for each hall as well as one for the office and one for the gym/other buildings.

On each Jamboard, I typed the name of each teacher/school staff member on a separate slide.

Students were told to add at least one sticky note to each Jamboard. If they wanted to leave multiple notes on one Jamboard, that was fine.

I did run into several issues that would make me rethink this in the future.

• The first teacher on each Jamboard tended to get more messages than the teachers/staff members who came later in the Jamboard.
• Because I did this for Valentine’s Day, the messages that students left were more generic than I would have liked. I was hoping they would write personalized messages of appreciation, but many students just wrote “Happy Valentine’s Day.”
• This year, I teach four sections of Pre-Calculus, one section of on-level Algebra 2, and one section of Statistics. As a result, I have a pretty skewed population of students. My students tend to be juniors and seniors who have elected to take an advanced math class that is not required for graduation. This meant that they don’t personally know many of the teachers that were listed on the Jamboards. Many of our special ed co-teachers got very few messages on their jamboards because my students just don’t even know who these people are.
• I had to copy and paste some of the generic thank yous/valentine’s messages to a few of the Jamboards because they got ZERO messages written on them at all.

At my previous school, I did this with pieces of 11 x 17 cardstock with each teacher’s name printed on the paper. I blogged about this Valentine’s Project here.

Students wrote their messages on colored hearts and then cut out the messages and glued/taped them to each poster.

This method (though it led to my room being a mess for an entire week) worked much better than the Jamboard method. Students were able to see which teachers/staff members had no/few messages. We also worked on these for several days. Their bellwork assignment each day for a week was to write a message to a teacher/staff member.

I’m glad I did the Jamboard activity, but I’m looking forward to pandemic teaching being over so I can pull out the glue and scissors again to do activities like this with paper!

I need to keep in mind, however, that the last time I did this activity with paper that I was working in a much SMALLER school. I am going to need a lot of paper and a ton of hearts!

One perk of doing it with Jamboard was that I was able to give some of my colleagues who haven’t used Jamboard in their own classrooms a taste of what a Jamboard activity looks like.