Earlier this week I Tweeted Terri Eichholz’s blog posts about hexagonal learning. In those posts she outlined how hexagonal learning worked in her classroom. It’s notable that Terri also shared the mistakes she made when trying to use visual hexagonal learning lessons with her students. Terri works with elementary school students. Hexagonal learning can also be used at the high school level as Russel Tarr outlines in his blog post about using it in his history classes. Russel offers a hexagonal learning template on his Class Tools website.

The Class Tools Hexagons Generator lets you create an online hexagonal learning activity to share with your students. To use the template just enter a topic then a minimum of five terms related to that topic. For example, I entered the topic of “American Revolution” then entered the terms “Stamp Act,” “Sugar Act,” “Boston Tea Party,” “Intolerable Acts,” and “Olive Branch Petition.” The generator then created five hexagons that my students can arrange online to show the connections between the topics. Students can also edit the hexagons to add explanations to the connections.

If you’re in a classroom that isn’t 1:1 you can print the hexagons created by the Class Tools Hexagons Generator.

Applications for Education
As Terri and Russel explain in their respective blog posts, hexagonal learning can be a great way to help students see how multiple topics within a subject are connected to each other. This can be an excellent activity for students to do when they are preparing to write a long research or editorial piece.