Get to Know The BookWidgets Ambassadors as They Reveal Their Favorite Classroom Activities - Part 2
Chelsey Both —
Teaching is constantly evolving, and educators everywhere are finding inventive ways to make lessons more interactive and meaningful. Among them are our BookWidgets Ambassadors, who show how technology can enhance learning and inspire both students and colleagues. ❤️
We’re excited to feature two of them and share the innovative ways they use BookWidgets. This is the second part of our series celebrating their inspiring stories.
In this blog, we will share the stories of:
Meet Guy Delcominette: Designing dynamic and interactive lessons while streamlining assignments
Meet Guy Delcominette, a Belgian-American teacher who makes lessons dynamic and interactive with BookWidgets. As a secondary World Languages teacher, he uses BookWidgets with Canvas to design activities while streamlining assignments and grading.
Transforming lessons into interactive adventures, Guy mixes pictures, audio, and videos to engage students in meaningful ways. He was immediately impressed by the potential of BookWidgets when he first discovered it a few years ago, and its user-friendly interface and wide variety of activities make creating lessons effortless.
Some activities spark collaboration on the interactive board, while others allow students to explore independently or in small groups through the LMS. Watching progress unfold in real time, he can quickly spot who needs extra support and reflect afterward to see which questions challenged the class the most, turning every activity into an opportunity for growth and discovery.
Here are 3 widgets created by Guy that he uses in his lessons 👇
Interactive Grammar Practice Worksheet
Teach your students about French geographical prepositions or any other grammar subject. Afterwards, let them practice the theory with an interactive Worksheet Widget. With 35+ question types, you have endless possibilities to create engaging activities. It helps Guy's students to strengthen their grammar skils. They can complete the worksheet at school or at home, just as they could with a traditional paper version. By digitalizing your worksheets, you save grading time. The Worksheet Widget can scores questions automatically, and you simply review the results and provide feedback where needed. Open-ended questions ask for more thorough feedback and guidance from you.
A powerful feature from this widget is live monitoring. While students work on the worksheet, you can track their progress in real time: see their names, last activity time, scores, and question numbers. You can also quickly identify which topics or questions were most challenging by reviewing the grades at a glance. If your worksheet includes questions that don’t automatically grade, the score you see is not the final one, but it still provides valuable insight into student progress. Guy loves using this feature to see which students need extra guidance and to give feedback right when it matters most.
💡 Pro Tip! Want to explore live monitoring further? Check out this blog post where we show you how to set up live widgets, navigate the dashboard, and identify which widgets include this feature and what information is displayed.
Engaging Randomness Widget Activity
Writing a story isn’t always straightforward, especially when creativity and language skills have to come together. Expressing ideas in a language other than your mother tongue can be challenging. Guy shared a great example with us. It’s a Randomness Widget featuring four spinning wheels, each filled with images. Students spin the wheels and use the four random pictures as inspiration to create their own story.
It may look like a simple widget at first (and yes, it really is 😉), but it can have a big impact in your classroom. Guy uses this activity to make writing less intimidating. By supporting part of the creative process, this activity helps students concentrate on writing their story in the foreign language, which is what really matters.
💡 Pro Tip! Do you want to learn more about the Randomness Widget? Check out this blog post! We’ll show you how it can be a valuable tool and share 25 ready-to-use lesson ideas using the Randomness Widget.
Creative French Listening Comprehension
Guy shared a creative Split Whiteboard activity about clowns. It’s a French listening comprehension exercise where students listen to sentences while reading them on the left side. When they’ve understood what was said, they draw what they just heard using the whiteboard on the right side. This example really shows the possibilities. On one side, he added pictures, text, and audio fragments, giving students everything they need in one single activity. As a teacher, you can decide whether your students draw on a blank whiteboard or on an image.
💡 Pro Tip! Students can adjust the size of each side of the screen. They can leave it in the middle, slide the line to the right to enlarge the whiteboard, or slide it to the left to make it smaller.
Meet Wesly Raymaekers: Making interactive lessons engaging while also easing his own workload
Meet Wesly Raymaekers, a Belgian who uses BookWidgets with students in class as well as in professional development settings. He teaches STEM in secondary school and integrates BookWidgets with Microsoft Teams or Smartschool, which is a Belgian digital school platform. Whenever he's not teaching he's helping his colleagues.
What Wesly particularly appreciates about BookWidgets is its flexibility. He uses it to shape lessons through webquests and other interactive activities, while the live widgets provide a quick overview of who is working on what. He also values the ability to send widgets via a link with an expiration date, which makes the process simple and efficient and ensures that students can no longer access the widgets after the set date. Overall, the flexibility of BookWidgets and its features significantly ease his workload, making lesson preparation and management much smoother.
Wesly’s goal? “To inspire teachers to see digital tools like BookWidgets not as extra work, but as a powerful way to support learning, where differentiation and creating content tailored to students are just as important.”
Now let’s explore 4 widgets from Wesly. Since he is from Belgium, these widgets are in Dutch. Luckily, you can still get a good sense of the possibilities and flexibility BookWidgets offers, and I’ll also highlight some of the features used in these activities. 👇
Hands-On Ecological Awareness WebQuest
This WebQuest Widget is a perfect example of how you can combine theory lessons with practical classes. In the first tab, Wesly sets the stage by introducing the topic and ensuring students understand what the class will cover. Next, he reviews what students already know from the previous year using a Quiz Widget integrated directly into the WebQuest. Students can progress at their own pace, and of course, Wesly is available to answer any questions along the way.
On the following tabs, Wesly dives deeper into the technical process, electricity, and practical information. While text provides the main content, he also adds interactive widgets to keep students engaged.
You might also notice the small lock on the final tab. This prevents students from skipping steps and jumping straight to the end. They will receive the password at the conclusion of their project, allowing them to continue working once they’ve completed the previous sections.
💡 Pro Tip! Want to dive deeper into the WebQuest Widget and even create one yourself? Check out our webinar or this blog post about creating a digital lesson with a WebQuest. Discover the step-by-step guide and fresh ideas to get started yourself. 👇
Discover and Learn with a Hotspot Image
Through an interactive Hotspot Image, students are introduced to one of the machines they’ll be using in the future. Wesly added multiple hotspots to it. By clicking on the different hotspots, students can access additional information and explanations. He makes the introduction to a new machine more engaging and helps students feel confident before working with it.
You can use it to introduce the machine to your students, or share it with them as a manual so they can refresh their memory before working with it.
💡 Pro Tip! Want to explore more about our Hotspot Widget? Check out this blog post with over 20 lesson ideas to integrate into your class. You can also watch our webinar, where we not only share examples but also explain how to create a hotspot widget yourself and give useful tips. 👇
Streamline Assessments with Rubrics
Wesly also uses rubrics often. The example he shared with us features a Quiz Widget with Rubric question types. He included four questions, which allows him to clearly distinguish the different aspects on which students will be assessed. This helps students understand what to focus on while completing their assignments, and it also makes it easier for Wesly to provide feedback afterwards. With this setup, he ensures students are actively thinking about each assessment criterion, making the learning process more engaging.
💡 Pro Tip! If you want to explore different types of rubrics, you can take a look at this teacher guide, which also includes ready-to-use examples for you.
Wrap up
Our ambassadors keep proving how much impact passion and dedication can have on student learning. We’re thrilled to highlight their work and share their stories with the wider BookWidgets community. This series is far from over, and we look forward to featuring even more inspiring stories from our BookWidgets Ambassadors. If you want to learn more about the Ambassador program, you can visit our website for all the details.
For those new to BookWidgets or looking for fresh ways to use it in class, this blog post is a great resource for tips on giving effective feedback and creating engaging assessments.
Keep up with the latest BookWidgets news and blog updates by following us on Bluesky, Instagram, and LinkedIn, or join our Facebook Teacher Community to connect with fellow educators and find tips and inspiration.
