Digital Breakout, Round 2

After a successful digital breakout last fall (you can read about it HERE), it was time to design another breakout for Literacy Studies students. And thanks to Matt Miller from Ditch That Textbook and guest contributor Mandi Tolen, tips and hints were available to help shape a new breakout for students. (You can read the blog post HERE.)

Photo by John Sting on Unsplash

With students more than one quarter into the school year, some find themselves in a bit of a reading slump. One of the goals of the breakout was to share book ideas with students, along with more traditional breakout goals like problem solving, team work, critical thinking, and communication.

The title of the breakout was "Let's Talk About Reading," and students merely scrolled the Home page of the Google Site to find two photographs of our own library. 

Clicking on the "obvious" elements in the photos, students accessed a variety of clues to help them determine the combinations to four different locks. (One of the elements was a dummy clue that took students to a humorous video related to books.) A Google Form embedded in the Site on a second page allowed students to enter a response, and they immediately received feedback from the Form to know if their response was correct.

So what kind of clues did the students access? One was a Google Slides presentation that included six of the most popular series in the library; another was a Google Doc that included the YALSA Top 10 titles from 2019. Students read a blog post related to five historical fiction titles, as well as a poem related to books. Working in small groups, students worked to determine as many lock combinations as they were able.

Later in the year, Literacy Studies students will work through a combination breakout--one that incorporates the physical locks and box that they used for an earlier breakout *and* the digital components they used for this breakout. Stay tuned for more problem solving, collaboration, and critical thinking!