Democratizing Learning with Digital Choice Boards
Three words guide our recent work on how to expand the ways that technology can be used for teaching and learning in schools and colleges:
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Digital = online/web based
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Choice = opportunities for users to make decisions for themselves
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Boards = surfaces on which materials are placed
Put these words together, and you get “Digital Choice Boards,”— online collections of materials that give students and teachers autonomy and agency. To date we have published more than 35 digital choice boards, which have been viewed and used by tens of thousands of educators, learners, and community members around the country and the globe. You can access them in our Digital Choice Boards and Interactive Learning Materials collection in ScholarWorks.
The idea for digital choice boards started in 2018 when the launch of the new Massachusetts eighth grade civics and government standards coincided with the University of Massachusetts W.E.B. Du Bois Library’s open education initiative. Inspired by the move toward access materials, and with the support of the university’s Public Service Endowment Grant, we embarked on a mission to create a brand-new open educational resource (OER), in the form of an eBook, that would help social studies/history teachers across the state implement each of the state’s 50 civics and government standards. The eBook, titled Building Democracy for All: Interactive Explorations of Government and Civic Learning, features chapters for each standard that encourage students to investigate as a historian, uncover hidden histories and untold stories, and participate in civic engagement discussions and activities.
We published Building Democracy for All in early 2020. At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic swept over the world, causing tumultuous shifts in teaching and learning. We began seeing pleas from educators on social media for the need for digital resources and learning activities for their remote, online, and HyFlex classes, and wondered how we could take our 700+ page Building Democracy for All eBook and turn it into something that teachers could use right away. So, we turned to the concept of a digital choice board. A choice board is “a graphic organizer that allows students to choose different ways to learn about a particular concept” (Reinken, 2012, para. 1). Digital versions of choice boards can feature hyperlinks to websites, videos, and other educational resources that can activate and deepen student thinking and learning.
Our first choice board, inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement that was resurging during the pandemic, was called “Black Lives Matter: Historical Explorations for Students and Teachers” and became part of our “Racial Justice and Black Lives Matter” learning pathway in the Building Democracy for All eBook. We posted the choice board on Twitter and Facebook— two popular professional development tools for K-12 teachers (Trust et al., 2016)— and it had thousands of views and hundreds of shares within a single day. This cemented the fact that teachers were in dire need of digital learning activities and resources that they could use to motivate student learning during emergency remote teaching.
Since then, we have continued to design digital choice boards for educators on a range of topics— some related to the Building Democracy for All eBook, others related to current events like the Ukraine-Russia Conflict and the 2022 World Cup. These choice boards are designed to engage students in critical thinking, creative knowledge construction, and critical media literacy activities as they explore connections between the past, present, and future. Each of these choice boards is published with a Creative Commons (CC) license to indicate that educators can freely use, remix, and share the choice board if they abide by the CC BY-NC-SA license (which requires them to give attribution and not use the choice boards for commercial purposes).
We opted for open access digital choice boards because they democratize learning—giving choice to students and teachers for how to use them, along with access to multimodal, multicultural resources that guide explorations of key issues facing local and global communities. In just a short time, we have seen how digital choice boards can propel deeper learning and give everyone in schools and colleges tools to expand their thinking and guide their actions as members of society.