Checking in with GIF, Emoji or Meme – OneHE

Activity

Community building activities, Reflective activities, Setting the tone activities

Checking in with GIF, Emoji or Meme

Maha Bali

A fun and quick way to check in or end a class with your students.

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ACTIVITY PURPOSE

To check-in or reflect using visuals quickly at the beginning (warm-up) or end (reflection) of class.

USEFUL FOR

Checking how students feel.

PREPARATION

None, you just need a space where students can post their visuals.

INSTRUCTIONS

Create a space where students can submit a visual to represent how they feel. This space can be a Zoom chat, a Google doc or Google slide deck, or Slack space.
Ask your students how they feel, and to post how they feel visually. The visuals can be anything, but some very easy ones are to use Emojis (one or more) in the Zoom chat, on Slack, etc. or to use GIFs. They can find them on GIPHY or you can install the GIPHY plugin on Slack to make it easier.
Remember to ask students to include alternative text for GIFs if they use them.
Another way to do this is to invite them to use Memes to express how they feel. This can be either manually by having them choose any image and add text on it via a simple tool like Paint or Google slides, or via a Meme Generator.

DURATION

5 minutes for students to post how they feel. Depending on how long you want to take to comment on how they feel, this could take 10 more minutes.

ADAPTATIONS AND EXAMPLES

Use the tool that’s most familiar to you and your students for adding the ‘how do you feel’ visual. Zoom chat is enough for emojis if you are already on Zoom. Slack makes it easy to use emojis or GIFs. Google slides are useful for adding still images and creating memes manually. Use whatever will take less time for students, so they can focus on expressing their emotions rather than technically posting the visual.
Remind students to use alt-text for images.
Some polling tools such as Mentimeter (paid version) may already have question types where people can vote by emojis, so you could display some emojis for students to choose from. Within Zoom, you could display some emojis or images and students could use the Zoom annotation feature (or use icons in Google slides) to indicate which one represents how they feel.
This activity can be done asynchronously if you want students to finish reading or watching something and express how they feel about it in an asynchronous space like Slack or Google doc.

TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS

Dependent on the tool you use.

USEFUL RESOURCES

Do you have any suggestions? Please share them in the comments below.

ABOUT

Educator prep: Minimal
Student prep: None
Synchronous, Asynchronous
Shared online space
Duration: < 5 mins

This activity is one of a series of activities from Equity Unbound, focused on equitable online community building.

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