Unit Guides That Are More Than Just Recycle Bin Material: HyperDocs

Imagine if a stranger walked up to you and just said, "Come on, let's go!" and expected you to follow without telling you anything else. You would be a fool to follow them, but sometimes we expect our students to do just that - follow without knowing where or why.

When we start units, students have to know where we're going and what we're doing otherwise they won't go where we want them to go. This is where unit guides come in. Unit guides themselves are not necessarily revolutionary. My first unit guides looked like this:

They were simple, a road map of what we were doing. I thought they were incredibly useful, but I kept finding them in the recycling bin. The problem was that students didn't do anything with them. They didn't need them for the unit; they were just nice to have. 

This is where the concept of a HyperDoc comes in. A HyperDoc is, to use a very basic definition, a document with links on it. These links should point students towards resources, activities, assessments, etc. They are interactive documents, which got me thinking about how I used my unit guides. 

If the problem was that students didn't need my unit guides, HyperDocs were the solution. I could turn the unit guide into the unit itself. I could embed videos for lessons, links to collaborative documents, and even simple things like the rubrics I was going to use. 

Here's what my unit guides ended up looking like after this realization:

All of the texts are linked on there to save time pointing students to the texts. I also was able to embed videos for each of the major concepts we covered. This meant that if a student needed to review a concept, it was already there for them. 

The most fun part was the incorporation of more collaborative activities through links in my HyperDoc unit guides. I could link to a Google Slides presentation for all of my students to work on together, or I could also link to a document where could all paste our own ideas. 

Collaborative slide show where students teamed up to develop a background presentation about the unit.

Document where students all put their ideas together.

However your unit guides end up, ask yourself the following questions:

1. Does it clearly show students what they will be learning and doing?
2. Does it encourage and support learning by providing additional resources?
3. Does it allow students to interact with it?
4. Does it encourage and facilitate collaboration?
5. Does it save time navigating to the texts?