HyperDocs: Applications for Elementary, Middle, and High School

As technology advances, so do innovations in the education sector. There are many initiatives, programs, and instructional tools that you can use to make teaching a lot easier. In a classroom, a typical learning cycle includes writing up lesson plans and a final assignment. You gather the requisite materials then teach the lesson. Finally, you have a test or assessment; it’s a very teacher-directed model that can be quite limiting because you spend a lot of time in direct instruction with very little time to work with students one-on-one. Enter HyperDoc.

What are HyperDocs

A HyperDoc is a digital document that allows you to create a lesson plan that you can share with your students. HyperDoc was coined from the fact that you hyperlink various documents in one place to create an amazing learning experience. With one short link, your learners can access a lesson plan with instructions, external links, tasks, and other clever ways to keep kids engaged in their learning.

For example, learners can take a virtual tour of a country through videos, images, games, etc. Think of a HyperDoc as a Google or Microsoft Word document that changes the worksheet or lecture teaching method. HyperDocs help learners access all the content they need in one organized digital space, creating a student-facing blended learning experience. By using HyperDocs, students at high school like the GIIS, have a voice and a hand in their learning. Instead of being passive observers, they create, collaborate, communicate, and critically think through the content.

Benefits of using a HyperDoc

There’s more time for one-on-one interaction

A good HyperDoc runs itself. It lets students work through the content without a lot of intervention from you to guide them during each step. With most students focused on the content, you are free to move around and interact face-to-face with the students. This allows you to identify anyone who might be having problems coping and offer more individualized help.

It’s flexible

In lecture type-lessons, there’s a chronological order to things. This step-by-step method has to cater to the whole class rather than individual students. If one part of the lesson isn’t working, changing it requires a lot of work. However, with HyperDocs, you can easily alter what’s not working, and the changes are immediate. Also, because every student gets their own copy of the document, you can change some of the elements to suit individual learning styles and needs. 

It more offers multimodal opportunities

In this digital era, kids are exposed to different media types, from videos to images, GIFs, slideshows, virtual reality, etc. Because a HyperDoc is digital, you can include different types of media, allowing every learner to access the learning material in a way the appeals to them. For instance, visual learners might look at images and videos first before getting to the articles explaining what’s in the pictures or video.

It breaks up the monotony of lecture lessons

Lecture-type lessons have been the norm for years. And while they somewhat worked, most students today don’t respond to these types of lessons. With HyperDocs, educators can step away from being the sage at the front of the class to becoming more of a guide on the side as students find their own way through the content. HyperDocs allows you to provide more than just direct instruction to students.

Teaching and learning have gone remote, and teachers require new ways to teach and engage learners. A HyperDoc isn’t a program or curriculum you adopt, but rather a way you can integrate technology into your teaching. It connects the lesson planning process to technology to effective pedagogy, increasing the thought and time put into the lessons you deliver.