🗑️ 50 Slides/PPT graphic organizer templates

📺 FREE WEBINAR: Building AI-fluent students

AI is growing by leaps and bounds. It’s going to change our world and our workforce.

Will your students be prepared?

Join me and fellow AI strategist/author Holly Clark in a FREE webinar hosted by FETC in partnership with National AI Literacy Day.

Date: TOMORROW (Friday, March 28, 2025)
Time: 4pm U.S. Eastern / 3pm Central / 2pm Mountain / 1pm Pacific
Location: Online
Recording: Available 24 hours afterward
Certificate of completion: Yes

Holly and I will discuss AI literacy, how to incorporate it into our schools, and how to prepare our students for the future.

You’ll leave with real talk and practical strategies you can use to support AI literacies in your classroom, school and district right away.

As Holly, my co-presenter, says: “AI isn’t science fiction. It’s the future your students will inherit.”

💡 THE BIG IDEA 💡

💡 50 Google Slides & PowerPoint graphic organizers

Assign students an uninspiring worksheet? They’ll fill it out. (Most of them will, anyway.) But we’ve seen lots of worksheets that don’t really lead to learning.

Give them a graphic organizer, though? It gets them thinking — because graphic organizers are designed to guide students through thinking.

• They help students see relationships between ideas (cause and effect, compare contrast, etc.).

• They put complex concepts in a more visual format to help students understand.

• They aid memory and recall, helping the brain store new ideas in a visual way.

• They encourage active learning rather than simple passive reception of new content.

Here’s the good news: You don’t have to spend money out of pocket on Teachers Pay Teachers for great graphic organizers.

In today’s updated post — 50 free graphic organizers and how to make your own — you can copy or download them for free.

• 30+ Google Slides and PowerPoint templates.

• 10+ Canva templates

• Links to libraries of thousands more.

• All for free — right here.

Here are examples of some of our favorites …

Pixar Story Structure template

You can tell almost anything as a story. All of the Pixar animated movies are told with this basic story structure: once upon a time, every day, one day, because of that, because of that, until finally. Students can use this story structure to show what they’ve learned in lots of grade levels and content areas:

• Life cycle of a butterfly (grade 2)

• American Revolution (middle school social studies)

• Solving quadratic equations (high school math)

• Water cycle (middle school science)

• Color theory (art)

• Teamwork in sports (PE)

• Cooking lessons (family and consumer science)

Frayer model template

A classroom classic. The Frayer model is commonly used to help students think about new vocabulary words, but it can be used in a variety of other content areas — and up and down the K-12 spectrum.

• Character analysis in literature (Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird)

• Visual art concepts (examples of surrealism)

• Scientific processes (condensation)

• Geography terms (peninsula)

• Math terms (surface area)

• Social emotional learning (empathy)

Plot diagram template

Much like the Pixar Story Structure template above, this template shows that good stories have rising action, a climax, and falling action. This template, submitted by educator Stephanie Avera, helps students chart that action — as well as important concepts around the action.

• Diagram literature, history, or scientific discoveries

• Students tell their own personal narratives

• Analyze current events

• Tell the biography of someone they’re studying

• Famous court cases

• Field trip reflections

Thinking about your thinking template

Reflection is a powerful, simple, often quick practice that can help students make sense of what they’ve learned — and place it in a greater context. This simple “thinking about your thinking” template gives students an easy-to-use protocol for thinking through new material.

• Science investigations (a surprising experiment result)

• Creating a work of art

• Building classroom community

• Mental health and wellness in a health class

• Project-based learning in a STEM or CTE field

• Guest speakers or convocations

BONUS: Canva templates!

Canva offers millions (yes, millions!) of pre-made templates for a variety of uses. (FYI: Most of those millions weren’t made for the classroom, and not all of the education ones are great, but there’s a LOT of good to choose from.)

An example: this reading response pack includes activities for story structure, central message, character traits, cause and effect, and more.

You can search all of the Canva graphic organizers in one place to find what you need.

💻 TECH TIP 💻

✍️ Create a fun WeWillWrite writing challenge

Have you met WeWillWrite? It’s a fun social writing platform that encourages students to practice writing in ways that they’ll BEG for.

What happens when you give students these low-stakes writing activities on a regular basis?

You watch them blossom into fluent writers before your eyes.

Here’s how to set up WeWillWrite social writing challenges on the FREE plan:

1. Create a free WeWillWrite account. (A premium plan will unlock all game features and content — plus more.)

2. Set up a writing challenge. With the free plan, pick one of the challenges available to you.

3. Share the challenge with students. Use a link or a PIN code like you do with other apps.

4. Students start the fun — writing! They’re given a short writing activity to do.

5. Students vote. They’re given a criteria to judge each other’s writing — and it’s all done anonymously.

6. Teacher provides feedback and celebrates. The teacher can pull up anonymous student writing for critique.

7. Students beg, “Can we do this again? For the rest of class? Tomorrow? FOREVER?!?” For real.

The more your students do these low-stakes writing activities, the more prepared they’ll be when the big writing project comes around.

👋 How we can help

There are even more ways I can support you in the important work you do in education:

1. Read one of my six books about meaningful teaching with tech.

2. Take one of our online courses about practical and popular topics in education.

3. Bring me to your school, district or event to speak. I love working with educators!