Try It Tuesday: Add Choice with an Interactive Tic Tac Toe Board!

One of the ways we can engage students in the classroom is by providing them with choices in their learning. Student choice helps students feel more empowered and in charge of their learning. 

Kasey Bell of the Shake Up Learning blog has a great suggestion for adding choice to your classes by creating an interactive Tic Tac Toe game using Google Docs. Her example is something she has created to teach teachers how to use their iPads, but the principles can be adapted for use with any age group/learning activities.

First, she introduces the key concepts or ideas she is working with. Then she has students work independently on activities to complete the Tic Tac Toe Board. Here's an example of the Board Kasey created for iPad learning (click here to go to the board in Google Drive).

Kasey uses the center square as:

• A required activity (as in this example) OR 

• As a free square (with no activity) OR

• As an open square where students can propose their own activity to demonstrate/further their learning. 

If you wanted to make this activity even more empowering, you could invite students to submit ideas to be included in a Tic Tac Toe board, or even invite them to create their own on a particular topic or theme. 

Kasey makes this activity more interactive by using Google Drive to create the Board.This allows you to include direct links to articles, videos, images, etc as part of the activity. As students work through the activities, they can just click on a link and go directly to any source material that's referenced. Here's more information on turning a Google Drive document into a web page. And if you're new to Google Drive, here's some information to get you started. 


How could you use this idea in your classroom? Leave us a note in comments and if you create your own Tic Tac Toe Board in Drive, be sure to share the link!