How To Use Boom Cards™ For Online Teaching

Is that the understatement of the year or what?!?  I wanted to share a few tips that will help get you started with the online portion of your job as we begin the 2020-2021 school year.  Educators definitely need to lean on each other during this new school year!

I know I’ve talked about Boom Cards before, but I wanted to go a little deeper to share more information. 

1. You need a Boom Learning account.  You can start with a free account if you wish.

2. Once you have an account, you can go to the Boom Learning “Store” or TpT to shop.  If you purchase in Boom Learning, you buy points and use those to make purchases.  When you purchase a Boom Deck, it will automatically show up in your “library” in your account.  If you purchase a Boom Card Deck on TpT, you will download the pdf and follow the directions to click the link to access the deck in your Boom account.  It is super simple, just click, confirm it is your account and then it is automatically in your library!

3. There are a couple of things you can do with your Boom Learning account when it comes to assigning Boom Cards to your class or students.  You can set up a “class”, and send your student’s parents codes to use to log in.  If you use this format, you can assign specific Boom Cards  to all students in your class, or to individual students.  The really neat thing with having students sign into a class is that you will be sent data for each Boom Card deck that they complete.  How AWESOME is that?!    Also, the decks that you assign will stay in that students folder as long as you have that class, so they can go back to any of them and “play” anytime. Now, if you have the free version, you can only have 1 class with 5 students.  So, if you want to be able to have more than 5 students in your class, you will need to upgrade.  The “Basic” membership is only $15 per year and then you can have 3 classes with 50 students. 

4. FastPlay:  This is an awesome option if you are only able to do the free account.  You can send a link via email, Seesaw, text, etc… for students to access the Boom Card Deck you want to assign.  With that link they can play it right away, without logging into an account and they will have access to it for 2 weeks!  However, you do not get data sent to you with a FastPlay link.  

BONUS:  Use Zoom to share your screen and then give control of your mouse to the student.  This way, you can pull up a deck of Boom Cards on your computer, and they can play it while you watch (you can still see each other’s faces).  You can see exactly what their answers are and you can take some data on your end!  See the steps below:

Step 1:  When you are in your Zoom meeting, click on the “Share Screen” button and choose to share your desktop and then pull up your Boom Card deck.

Step 2:  Click on the little mouse icon that says “Remote Controlled”.

Step 3:  In the drop down, click on the name of the other person’s computer/i-Pad.

Step 4:  They now have control and can do the activity while you watch.  You can provide prompts and feedback.  

Step 5:  When you are ready to take control back of your mouse, click on the mouse icon that says “Remote Controlled” and click on “Abort Control”.

Here are some additional videos I created that show Boom Cards in action and highlight some of the new Boom Card resources I created for Fall: