The objective of MOVE: Brainstorming the Perfect Scholarship Essay is for students to generate ideas in response to multiple scholarship essay prompts to help pay for post-high school academic plans. Students will brainstorm various strategies and sample responses for several scholarship essay prompts.

Whether you are teaching face-to-face, remotely, synchronously, or asynchronously, we hope one of the ideas listed below will work for you!

Ideas to Conduct the Activity Virtually (or with less movement):

• Use this slide deck which combines both the Essay Prompt questions and the Discussion Questions. 
• Use a Number Picker Wheel to first select which Discussion Question students will answer. Then, use the Number Picker Wheel again to decide which Essay Prompt question to answer, allow students to self-select an Essay Prompt, or systematically go through each one. 
• Have students write down their ideas using any of the implementation ideas below.
• Nearpod: Create a Nearpod lesson that includes either the Collaborative Board (students can see each other’s ideas and answers) or Open-ended Question (only the teacher can see the student’s ideas or answers) for students to submit their ideas and response to each Essay Prompt & Discussion Question. 
• Padlet: Have students post their responses to a Padlet, an online virtual bulletin board. Either have students collaborate on one Padlet that you, the teacher, have created or have students create their own Padlet listing their responses for the entire activity. The student can then submit a link to their individual Padlet at the end of the activity for grading. 
• Google Classroom Question: If you are a Google Classroom user, add a “Question” for each of the Essay Prompt questions. After you spin the Number Picker Wheel to determine the Discussion Question, students can go into Google Classroom and add their response. A wonderful feature of Google Classroom Question is that students cannot see their classmates' responses until they themself have submitted their answer. You can turn on the ability for students to reply to each other, making it a discussion format.  
• Google Slides: Create a template Google Slide deck that allows students to write their response to the Essay Prompt and Discussion Question on one slide. SlidesMania has some creative “notebook style” slide deck templates that would work great for this activity!
• Post-it Notes: The final implementation idea is to use traditional Post-it Notes. This would work well if you are teaching face-to-face but want to limit movement in your classroom. Or if teaching remotely, you could have students write their answers on individual Post-it Notes, index cards, or pieces of paper and take a picture of their work to submit to you for feedback and grading. 

Many of these implementation ideas will allow for an automatic “gallery walk” (Part III of the activity) so students can see each other’s responses or ideas. If you are teaching remotely and have the ability to use Breakout Rooms, consider having students “rename” themselves to include the Essay Prompt number they would like to discuss further. For example “1 - Amanda” would indicate I would like to be put in a Breakout Room to further discuss Essay Prompt #1. You can then quickly group students based on their selected numbers for a more in-depth discussion.

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Have you taken an NGPF activity and creatively adapted it to a virtual environment? If so, reach out to Amanda at [email protected] to share your ideas for a future blog post! 

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Looking for more suggestions on how to facilitate an NGPF activity in a virtual environment? View NGPF’s Virtual Adaptation Series!

About the Author

Amanda Volz

Amanda joins the NGPF Team with over 20 years of experience teaching personal finance. During that time, she led her students to hundreds of thousands of dollars in scholarships, won multiple awards, and most importantly, impacted the financial lives of thousands of high school students. Amanda prides herself on being an educational leader and is constantly looking for innovative ways to make the classroom relevant, rigorous, and fun. She is a passionate advocate for financial education and has been a long-time member of the NGPF community. Fun fact - Amanda was NGPF’s first teacher account! When Amanda isn’t working, she enjoys cooking, gardening, and traveling with her husband and two children.

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