Working with Net.Create in Classrooms of All Sizes

Classroom Activities

While any research team or classroom can take advantage of Net.Create’s simultaneous editing and visualization structure, we have several activity templates that work for different classroom sizes and age groups.

Higher-Ed/College Classrooms

• College Classroom Joint Reading Activity. Have a complex text students struggle to understand? This activity uses a co-reading activity to help individual students in a large classroom engage with 1 or 2 pages of unfamiliar text. Net.Create helps the whole class take their new familiarity with a short excerpt and combine that expertise into a whole-class generated set of interactions and notes that students can use as an entry point to independent reading of the whole text.

Middle School Classrooms

The 1-pager lesson plans here are aligned with some common activities built into English-language-arts and social-studies state standards across the US.

Social Studies

• Greek Mythology Network Overview. In this 8th-grade World History lesson plan, students will read Greek Myths and write 6 word biographies of themselves. Students then build onto a network visualization, demonstrating connections among gods, locations, mortals, and characteristics. Students will add themselves to the network, indicating gods, mortals, locations, or characteristics they identify with and analyze the interactions among the Greek nodes and their classmates’ nodes.
• Greek voting Network Overview. In this 8th-grade World History lesson plan, students will read Greek Myths and write 6 word biographies of themselves. Students then build onto a network visualization, demonstrating connections among gods, locations, mortals, and characteristics. Students will add themselves to the network, indicating gods, mortals, locations, or characteristics they identify with and analyze the interactions among the Greek nodes and their classmates’ nodes.

English Language Arts

• Fact/Fiction network. In this ELA lesson plan, students will explore a network centered on the novel ‘The Book Thief’ by Markus Zusak, which blends fictional characters and events with real history. Students will interact with and add to network visualizations that represent connections between factual and fictional events, places, and people from the novel.

We’re happy to share information about how to run Net.Create in your classroom, along with our slide deck, a list of shared features for the primary and secondary sources we’ve used with this activity, and whatever help we can offer you and your students.