Who says summer vacation ever has to come to an end?
This fully editable collection of Google Slides transforms your classroom into a virtual travel agency — and gives your students the chance to fuse content knowledge with creativity as they lock in their understanding of the places, spaces, and settings that are of particular importance to your course content. Whether you’re a..
- Fourth grade art class studying the pyramids of Ancient Egypt…
- A seventh grade Spanish class learning all about life in modern day Madrid…
- A 9th grade English class learning all about the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird…
- Or an AP United States History class capping off a unit about the living conditions in on the battlefields of the Civil War…
This slide collection is the perfect way to help students imaginations run wild!
Their goal? Work as a team plan out a full-blown excursion to whatever place you’re studying using these eye catching and easy to edit templates. This eye-catching slide collection offers six separate challenges that will require their close attention to detail:
- Home Screen
- Search Page
- Must-See Attractions
- Points of Interest
- Can’t-Miss Experiences
- Guest Feedback
For this activity, we recommend dividing your students into competing teams of 4-5 travel agencies working together on a single slide deck. Their mission: work with their teammates to develop a slide collection that takes visitors on an interactive tour of any place, space, or setting that might be of particular interest to whatever unit you are currently studying. Kick back, relax, and let your imagination run wild!
Simply share a copy of this fully editable Dream Getaway slideshow with each of your students (or groups!) and they’ll have everything they need to start building something amazing.
This Activity is Divided into Two Phases:
1. The Creation Stage (day one) and…
2. The Presentation Stage (day two)
We recommend dedicating every bit of a full 40 minutes (or more) to the Creation Stage, and an additional 20 minutes (or more) to the Presentation Stage. For this reason, it might make the most sense to divide this activity over two full days of class if your classes meet daily.
Here’s a closer look at each of the five activities that this resource contains:
Home Screen
They say a picture tells a thousand words. And this first slide offers your students the chance to present a clear and stunning visual of whatever location they’ll be traveling to on this virtual getaway. Encourage students to scour the web to find particularly attractive photos of the places they’ve studied — or use old school pen and paper (and crayons and markers and…) to draw your very own photos of fantasy lands that you’ve been reading about in class. With a single click, you can upload the new photo in place of the default image and begin your dream vacation.
Search Page
This fully editable page is the centerpiece of your students’ travel planner. It gives them the chance to provide about a paragraph’s worth of information on four key spaces or places to rent when visiting this dream destination. Each component of this page is fully editable — and the cohesive effect of not one or two or three but FOUR high quality listings all stacked up beside one another on a single page is an outstanding way to help your students get a clear picture of what your current unit of study is all about and WHY!
What sort of accommodations might be available if you were taking a virtual trip to the heart of Paris?
Where might travelers stay if they were given a set of possible options in Ancient Rome?
How many clever or creative housing possibilities can you think of set in the world of The Hobbit?
Must-See Attractions
The third editable slide in the portfolio will test your students’ ability to identify areas of particular interest in the area of their virtual vacation. This fully editable slide works as a two step process:
STEP 1.
Find (or create) a map of the location you’d like to visit. Students can use Google Maps, the open internet, or old-school drawing materials. Simply upload the picture in place of the default map when they are done.
STEP 2.
Drag and drop all ten of the marker flags and as many of the travel icons as you’d like. The template will do all of the hard work for you, allowing students to drop location markers and points of interest directly overtop of their map. Pretty cool, huh!?
Points of Interest
This slide gives students the chance to flesh out just a bit more detail so as to provide the “why” behind each “what” that they included on the previous slide. This activity is all about metacognition, and it offers your classes not only the chance to make a list of the most important details in the area that they’re studying, but it likewise allows them the opportunity to provide a brief rationale as to why each of these items are noteworthy in the first place. The end result: your students will be THAT MUCH MORE LIKELY to remember what they’ve learned!
Can’t-Miss Experiences
Now that you’ve secured lodging for the length of your stay, take some time to see all one-of-a-kind experiences that this spectacular location has to offer. Now’s your chance to load up a vacation itinerary that will help you make memories that can last a lifetime! This slide provides students with the opportunity to do a little bit more exploring of the place that they’ve chosen to visit for this virtual getaway, and offers fully editable templates for the kinds of must-see experiences that await in this far off destination.
Guest Feedback
On the final slide in the presentation, everybody’s a critic! And this gives your students the opportunity to provide a detailed look from the customer’s perspective of just what it might be like to have spent a few days visiting one of the places that they’ve created. Imagine your high school English classroom just finished reading the story of Macbeth and a team decided to offer up a night in the king’s castle for a vacation rental property. How would they account for all of the strange sights and sounds that took place in that location? And how might different customers have vastly different opinions about the property’s value?
DUNCAN: Great food and hospitality — after such a big meal, I am *DYING* for a good night’s rest.
LADY MACBETH: 1/5 stars. Oof! I couldn’t sleep a wink. I swear this place is haunted! Did anybody else see ghosts in the hallway?!
We can’t wait to see where your students’ imaginations will lead them!
This fully editable collection of Google Slides templates is just one of the 300+ resources available in the EMC² Learning library. This entire library is available to Engagement Engineers and members of the Creative Corps, and is included with your annual site membership. We hope you’ll consider joining us as an Engagement Engineer to unlock a full year of site access. For complete details including our exclusive limited time offer for annual site membership, click here.
