5 Ways to Use Memes to Increase Engagement in Lessons

​1. RULES, PROCEDURES & CHECK-INS

There is nothing kids look forward to more than sitting through six classes of syllabus lectures and rule speeches on the first day of school.

Starting the school year with a list of what not to do or a rules lecture creates a culture of compliance. Instead, I’d prefer out-of-the-box thinking, risk-taking, and pushing boundaries with innovative ideas. So, how do I set the tone for what my classroom is all about?

While I need to review some classroom expectations, I try to do it memorably. For example, I have created a slide show of memes that illustrates behaviors that I don’t like in a very humorous way. This lets kids know that while I have expectations about how they conduct themselves in my class, learning can be fun…even when learning about rules.
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At the end of the slides, I give them the chance to create memes about teacher behaviors that annoy them. It’s only fair, right?

After my presentation, students created their memes in a shared slide deck about their expectations of me. Since I have students create memes throughout the year, this first day of school lesson serves multiple purposes.

• Communicating my expectations for how students conduct themselves in my classroom.
• Learning what students like/dislike about teacher behaviors.
• Students learn to create slide memes in a task with a low cognitive load, developing familiarity with the task so that they are not overwhelmed when they use this skill later with academic content.
• Students learn technology-related skills for presentations (word art, drop shadow, image manipulation, etc.)

Bonus: Grammar Memes
Memes about rules can make those rules memorable. There are lots of rules that students have to learn in school that are unrelated to classroom behavior, and adding a meme to a lesson can help make those rules stick. My friend, Kevin Feramisco, was creating a Grammar Hyperdoc and looking for ideas. I sent him this:

CHECK-IN MEMES
Check-in memes can be fun, too. Ask students to rate how they are feeling based on a scale or grid of memes. A grumpy cat is always a popular addition to these types of memes. I made this Randy Quaid version for a staff meeting during distance learning. It got a lot of laughs and helped lighten the mood.

2. DAILY (OR WEEKLY) CURRENT EVENTS PROTOCOL

In History class, I used CNN 10 for daily warm-up activities. Students go to https://www.cnn.com/cnn10 to watch a ten-minute video highlighting several top news events. Then, students create a meme in a shared slide deck. It takes just a couple of minutes to create a meme.

Students can choose the news story they find intriguing and create a meme for the selected news. Because three current events were highlighted in the video, the slide presentation turned into a guessing game in which the class had to guess which news story the meme was from.

​When the meme-making task is complete, spend five minutes (or less) going through the slide show, asking students to guess which news story each meme is from.​ On Friday, I have students submit their best meme from the week for a grade (see image below). I don’t need to grade these every day. Seriously, you don’t have to grade everything. Students participate daily because they enjoy the task, not because they want a grade.

​3. LIT MEMES

​I love the motivational poster meme as a template to move students from identifying a topic to describing a theme, which seems to be a real struggle for middle school readers. Memes are a fun and effective way for students to show their understanding of characters, conflicts, or plots from the books that they are reading. ​

4. WHAT DOES IT MEME?

Memes are a great way for students to show their understanding of word meanings. Since memes, by definition, are meant to be shared, create a collaborative slide presentation in which all students can add their memes. ​I love using the exploding brain meme as a template for students to show their understanding of connotative and denotative word meanings.

​5. HISTORY MEMES: WHAT IF I TOLD YOU…

The “What if I told you…” meme is an excellent way to get students to think about elements of our culture that ancient civilizations may have influenced. The example below is taken from a unit on Ancient Greece. We learned about Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, and I showed them a video clip from the film The Matrix, which has been compared to Plato’s allegory.

My students have digital portfolios in the form of Google Sites. They add samples of their work on their websites throughout the year. These sites, or digital portfolios, are a great reflection tool. Since much of our work is digital, student websites are perfect for showcasing their work at Open House. We have one small bulletin board for seventy students who learn in my classroom, so digital portfolios become individual bulletin boards for the students. The meme task described here adds something more engaging to a written assignment posted on their website.

​The Portfolio Writing Task:
Write a post on the History page of your website that responds to the following prompt: Which elements of modern Western culture or thought do you think have been (directly or indirectly) influenced by ancient Greek philosophy? Create a “What if I told you” meme to show what you know. The examples shown below are my student’s memes with their written response to my prompt from their digital portfolios.

The “What if I Told You” meme would also be a great template for students to share different perspectives on a historical event.

6. THE MORAL OF THE STORY

 Memes can add an extra level of engagement to text-based lessons. For example, there was a lesson on Aesop’s fables in the textbook during a History unit on Ancient Greece. I was shocked that my students had made it to middle school and claimed not to know what a fable was, so we took a detour into the land of Aesop. The original fables were quite tricky for my students to read and understand. They struggled to identify a moral when it wasn’t clearly stated at the end of the short text.

Even when the moral was stated, the language used to communicate it was somewhat unfamiliar. I noticed that students didn’t understand the moral and could not connect it to real-life situations.

After a little direct instruction, their task was to create a meme for the moral of a fable. When the slides were presented in class, students had to summarize the fable and explain how the moral relates to middle school life.  We created a shared slide deck of favorite fables and added memes to explain the moral.

​Interested in Memes? Check Out These Additional Resources:
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How to Create Funny Memes About Issues That Matter from KQED
​WITCOIN: THE NEW MEME ECONOMY from David Theriault