Get your students thinking with Lino It! (Try it yourself HERE!)

I have posted about Lino It before. Lino It is a virtual wall that allows you and your students to post "sticky notes" onto the virtual wall for everybody to see. This virtual board/sticky note concept is quite popular: Lino It, Wallwisher, corkboardme are some examples of websites that do this. Finding these tech tools is one thing, but how should we use them? One example of Lino It that I have used with success and found to really make my students think is a "Category Organization" activity. On Monday, I post a Lino board on my website. I set the settings to allow anyone to post a lino sticky note. I tell my students that throughout the week, they need to post a lino sticky note with any fact about Egypt (we were currently in our Egypt unit). I told them the requirement was 2 sticky notes per student. I used a different board for each of my five classes. All 127 students on one board would not have been good. At the end of the week, I took my classes into the computer lab and they needed to organize all the sticky notes on the Lino board into 4 specific categories: Nile River, Mummification, Religion and Miscellaneous. I told them that they needed to find at least 5 sticky notes per category. This gets them thinking about what categories each fact belongs to. It also can produce some debate on where the fact belongs or fits the best. If you can not get a computer lab for the organization activity, simply tell them to do it on their own.  Try it below!