Earlier this week I received an email from a reader who was looking for some ideas for creating virtual manipulatives she and her elementary school students to use during remote instruction days. I had two ideas immediately come to mind that I shared with her and I’ll share with you.
The first idea I shared was to use Google Drawings to make virtual manipulatives and then distribute them through Google Classroom. You can do this in two ways. One is to make a set of text boxes and other shapes in Google Drawings and then share it as an assignment in Google Classroom. The other way is to make an assignment and then choose “Drawings” to create a new drawing to distribute to students. In this video I demonstrate how to do that.
My other suggestion for making virtual math manipulatives was to try Lumio (disclosure, a recent advertiser on this blog). Lumio offers more than a dozen premade virtual math manipulatives that you can use to create individual and group online mathematics activities. Here’s a little video overview of Lumio’s virtual manipulatives.
