Classroom Ready
Template Library
Practical, adaptable unit frameworks for social studies classrooms. Download-and-use tools with clear pedagogical instructions.
For the social butterflies in the audience!
Fake Social Media Templates
Many of these have been featured on the amazing Ditch That Textbook Website. Currently, these are only in Canva. Other formats forthcoming!
If your favorite website is missing, check out the library of a BILLION templates over at Ditch That Textbook.
Discord has a reputation problem in schools. Admins hear it and immediately picture a 14-year-old screaming about Fortnite at 2 am. Fair. But structurally? A Discord server is one of the best discussion formats we have. Multiple threads, emoji reactions as low-stakes agreement signals, and the ability to reply specifically to one person without bulldozing the whole conversation. That’s just a Socratic seminar with better UX.
Discord has a reputation problem in schools. Admins hear it and immediately picture a 14-year-old screaming about Fortnite at 2 am. Fair. But structurally? A Discord server is one of the best discussion formats we have. Multiple threads, emoji reactions as low-stakes agreement signals, and the ability to reply specifically to one person without bulldozing the whole conversation. That’s just a Socratic seminar with better UX.
If Discord is the public square, WhatsApp is the hallway outside the classroom where the real conversation is already happening. Shorter messages. Tighter turns. Read receipts are doing the emotional labor. The three dots that mean someone is about to say something that is either very smart or very wrong.
This template works best when the constraint is the lesson.
I love Kickstarter. I’ve got some pretty cool comics and other collectibles that may not have been found because they never hit traditional retail shelves. So, how can we catch this magic in the classroom? Kickstarter, or as we are calling it in the classroom, Jumpstarter, is a one-time crowdfunding campaign built around a specific project or idea. The campaign has a goal, a deadline, and most importantly, a tiered reward system. Backers get different things depending on how much they pledge.
That tiered reward structure is where the learning lives.
I also love Patreon. I have used it to support comic book artists I love (when I have the extra money), but I mostly support some of my favorite podcasts. If they are going to put in hard work to keep me entertained (especially D and D content!), I want to slide you a few extra bucks. So in the classroom, we can use Patreon, Teacheon in our version, to think about investments differently. Instead of a one-time campaign, it is an ongoing subscription model. Supporters pay a monthly amount in exchange for
Here is why this suggestion hits differently. Most of the social media templates in either my collection or Matt’s Ditch That Textbook library (which is where this energy and inspiration came from) are platforms that students already use. Discord, dating sites, Instagram etc. These are websites and/or apps that students interact with frequently. They intuitively know the grammar of the format.
GoFundMe is different. Most of our students have not personally created a GoFundMe. But they have seen them. They have been tagged in them. They have watched them go viral. They understand, on a gut level, what makes one compelling and what makes one easy to scroll past. They know the difference between a campaign that makes you stop and one that doesn’t.
So, in teaching geography to 7th graders last year, I had to come at them sideways to get them to care about natural disasters. So I thought, major events—be they economic collapses, hurricanes, or world wars—do not happen in a vacuum; they require a specific “match” of circumstances to ignite. Dating Profiles for Disasters posits that every disaster has a “type.” By framing a catastrophe as a seeker of a partner, students are forced to identify the preconditions and catalysts that allow that event to thrive. This strategy strips away the “inevitability” of history and science, revealing that disasters are simply the result of a “perfect date” between volatile variables.
We live in a visual-first culture where “vibe” and “aesthetic” are shorthand for complex identities. The finstagram uses visual curation to represent the zeitgeist of a topic. This strategy posits that a student hasn’t truly understood a concept until they can “brand” it. By selecting nine images and captions that represent a theme, students are performing a “triage of significance.” They are deciding what is “post-worthy” and what is “behind-the-scenes,” forcing them to prioritize the most iconic and influential aspects of a unit.
This activity targets contextual surveillance. Students must identify the “disturbances” in a system. To write a convincing Neighboor post, they have to recognize what is “normal” for that environment and what constitutes a “threat” (e.g., an invasive species, a new tax, or a shifting tectonic plate). This requires them to weigh the “stability” of a system against the “interlopers” trying to disrupt it.
The Craigslist Missed Connections format does something a traditional prompt cannot: it gives students a voice, a perspective, and a dramatic stake in the outcome. They are not writing about the missed connection from the outside. They are writing as one of the subjects, the historical force, the literary character, the scientific concept, looking back at the moment of near-intersection with longing, regret, or frustration.
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