I've been a high school teacher for eighteen years and middle school teacher for about a year-and-a-half. Throughout my entire teaching career, I have enjoyed the process of creating and utilizing Bulletin boards in my classroom. In recent years, I have been developing bulletin boards to use outside my classroom in high-traffic hallways, guidance offices, and libraries.

Obviously, I want my bulletin boards to attract student attention otherwise, why bother creating them? I spend a lot of time planning my bulletin boards so they are attractive, well-organized, easy to read, and most importantly- contain great content. About five years ago, I started thinking about new ways I could use my bulletin boards in my classroom. I started thinking about my favorite bulletin boards I've seen in schools, on campuses, or online. Right away I noticed a common theme. My favorite bulletin boards were boards that contained great content and were engaging.  My students feel the same way. I often ask them to provide me with honest feedback regarding the bulletin boards I create. My students admit that what attracts them to a bulletin board is more than appearance. They are interested in great content they can use. They also want to engage with the content, otherwise, it's just another "boring bulletin board."

The first interactive bulletin board I created was an awareness bulletin board for a group I was advising. Several years ago I volunteered to take over as our high school's GSA (Gay-Straight Alliance) advisor. One of our group's first challenges was to educate our student population about our group. We brainstormed strategies and came up with a great list including announcements, sidewalk messages, and a bulletin board containing terminology, facts, statistics, quotes, and resource links and phone numbers. We decided to put our board up in a "high traffic area" where it would get noticed. We also decided to make our board interactive by using "flippable" cards as a way to present information. For example, the front of a card would contain a "quiz" question and inside would be the answer and a QR code to scan to learn more about the topic.

Our LGBTQ Awareness Interactive Bulletin Board was so popular I decided to make similar boards focusing on other important topics such as Mental Health Awareness, Domestic Violence Awareness, Anti-Bullying, Women's History, and many more topics.  Last year I created a Women's History QR Code Interactive Bulletin Board that I used to help raise awareness of women's history. I thought it would be fun to offer a prize to the first student who could identify all 30 women profiled in the bulletin board. Pictured here is Lexi, our winner!


My favorite interactive bulletin board is my Why History Matters Bulletin Board. I created a lesson centering around this bulletin board which includes a stations activity. This is something I use with my students at the beginning of the school year. I love this bulletin board and stations activity because it addresses common questions middle and high school students have about Social Studies and History; questions like "Why do we study history?" "How can we use history?" "How do we "do" history?" I leave my "Why History Matters" bulletin board up most of the year, often referencing it whenever we discuss topics such as primary and secondary sources, oral history, and historiography.


Interested in my interactive bulletin boards? You can find the bulletin boards mentioned in this blog post (and others) in my TpT store!