Virtual Glossary and Science Word Wall in the Digital Learning Classroom

Sometimes as a high school teacher I find myself looking for ideas to use in the classroom that are commonplace in an elementary classroom. One great idea I stole from the lower grades is a word wall.  

I have also jazzed it up a bit for Distance Learning by adding a Virtual Glossary and Interactive Notes online.

If you have never heard of a word wall then let me explain this to you and show you how I made it interactive in the Digital Classroom. 

According to Readingrockets.com: A word wall is a collection of words which are displayed in large visible letters on a wall, bulletin board, or other display surface in a classroom. The word wall is designed to be an interactive tool for students and contains an array of words that can be used during writing and reading.

Here are some pictures of word walls in classrooms:

  

I liked that the word wall is available for students to use at all times in the classroom and is a decorative addition to the classroom.

Over February Break I put together a list of 330 terms that are commonly used in Earth Science class and put them into a Google Slide document. I originally thought that it would be used in the physical classroom and started to print out and tape the terms onto my classroom windows. I started doing it for the units that we already covered as you can see here

Now that the school buildings are closed I realized that the physical word wall on my classroom windows isn't going to work so what I did was take the google slides and I tagged each slide to alphabet slides so students could search the terms without having the scroll through the entire document. This would allow them to have their own Virtual Word Wall at home. 

Here's a short video to show you how easy the Virtual Glossary is to use.

I also took the handouts and made them so that they can be used in Google Classroom without having to print them out. As you can imagine, it took a considerable amount of time to create 330 vocabulary slides and handouts for 12 different units so I figured that I might as well make it available to you so you and your students can use it as well.

Click here to access the files and many more of my resources.