Assignment Spotlight: The Congressional Squares

It's Ed Tech Tuesday and I have an exciting assignment to share with you all today!It's a modern twist on the old Hollywood Squares game and turned out to be a fun and engaging activity in my online course. Check out today's blog post to learn more about it!

I had been thinking about creating this assignment for some time. During one of my sessions of looking through various teaching strategies, I came across a fun educational twist on Hollywood Squares and LOVED the idea but couldn't think of a way to use it in my online class so I stored it away for a future use. For those unfamiliar with Hollywood Squares, it is a game where Hollywood actors are selected by contestants to answer questions in a tic-tac-toe fashion. In the sample template I saw, the educator used Sesame Street and Disney characters as the "Hollywood" characters as she was a Kindergarten teacher. I was stumped about how to use this in my online course, but it just looked like too much fun not to try it!

Finally, one day I had the idea of putting political figures in the squares for my health policy course! First I thought of doing it in the traditional way of having a question prompt on each slide with a select political figure and then students would select decide whether they agreed with their answer. However, I thought there might be a way to elevate the activity a bit more and decided that instead of asking questions, I would list one of the political views of the respective figure and then students would indicate whether. they agree with that view or not.

Below are some samples of what the assignment looks like.

I designed this activity to be completed in VoiceThread, but it can also be completed as a traditional Discussion Board activity as well using the deck as a PowerPoint slide that's attached to the assignment instructions. If you're interested in seeing a full example of this assignment, click HERE. I'd love to here your feedback on this assignment in the Facebook Group.