Guest Blogger - Mark Mabbett

Google A Day Meets Breakout Edu, What?

Mark Mabbett-Teacher-Librarian, Nederland High School

In September I decided to try some of the A Google A Day activities with my US Film and Society class. I quickly found two problems. First, many of the questions weren’t really relevant to my class. Yes, students put various skills into practice but the content never really related to my course. And the bigger problem, for the pre-made Google a Day challenges I tried, my students just Googled the exact question and found the answers. So, after a little dismay, but also pride, I was reminded of a session I went to at GAFE 2014 by Holly Clark. My big take away from Holly’s session was that if students could Google the answer then we’re not really asking the right questions. I’ve started making my own Google A Days, I put in the content I want making it difficult for students to Google an answer. They often have to Google discrete parts of the question and put them all together. Hopefully, this makes them better at breaking down complex research tasks into searchable units.

Here are a couple of examples that I have used so far:

This example allowed me to review the film Scarface (1932) with them which was a film we had watched earlier in the semester.  

This second slide is a simple substitution where the answer to 1 becomes the 1 in the goo.gl.
Go ahead, see if you can solve it?  

It took about 10 minutes for students to work it out with their group but they’re were always having fun solving the puzzle and building community in their group. I still got them to read an article for me about what makes successful team dynamics before they started on their next group film project.  

I don’t have them conduct these exercises everyday, a let down for many students, they work collaboratively and they persevere through multi-step problems. If you’re thinking, “this sounds a bit like something else I’ve heard of” you would be right. Many of us have heard, seen, or hopefully participated in BreakoutEDU or similar breakout tasks.

Coincidentally, the final film that we will be viewing in my class is Inception (2010). Inception was a mind bending film where Leonardo DiCaprio and his team travel into people’s subconscious minds to attempt to unlock information and plant ideas in their minds. Of course, this will be a great segue into a final BreakoutEDU game that will allow my students to put to use many of the skills they have been building and practicing during our various Google a Day challenges. They’ll be challenged to open levels of locks to hopefully "breakout" as a team.