Career Poster Project Using Technology

Do your students participate in Take Your Child to Work Day or does your school host a Career Day? I am sharing a fun poster product using technology with a free download.  Keep reading to find out how we safely research online, make our posters, and create a digital picture of students' future careers!

Take your child to work day falls on the third Thursday of April and each year I seem to have about half of my class opt to attend work with a parent and about half come to school.  I wanted to make sure the students in school had something meaningful to do, but I also did not want to move the curriculum along when so many students were absent.

Career Day Poster Project Overview

The last few years I have done a technology project for the students in school and out of school focusing on careers.

If your area does not "celebrate" Take Your Child to Work Day, this technology project will also work for any career day, community helper unit, or even a beginning of the year "Hopes & Dreams" lesson for those of you that follow the Responsive Classroom.

Set Up the Career Day Project 

To set up, I printed a set of bodies for students to write their information on and decorate.  Click here to download the pdf for free.

I printed these large across two pages using the Adobe .pdf printing settings I explain in my blog here.  I taped the pages together so everyone had one large body.

Research Careers

Next, students selected a career they were interested in and wrote the name of the job inside the head. Students that went with parents had the option of choosing the career they "did" for the day.

Students used KidRex to search safetly.

I recommend having students type the word "job" or "career" after their search term to narrow it a bit. I also always have my students select from the top five results that pop up as they are going to be the most relevant and cuts down on scrolling.

Students wrote facts around the outside of the body that they learned.  They had to find the training, schooling, day-to-day responsibilities, skills, and any fun facts about that particular job.

Make the Career Poster

Students then colored the body to reflect the uniform or everyday attire of someone in that career.

As an added extra, this year we used PicCollage on the iPads to make a mock-up of each student being that job!  I got this idea from the fabulous Teaching with Appitude's Instagram account.  She also has a sample on Facebook here.

We used the in-app image search to find a picture of the career.  Then we took a selfie in the app and trimmed around the head and popped it on the body.

Make a QR Code to Display Career Posters

I had students upload their finished images to Google Drive where I quickly made a QR code of each image using the process explained here.

I taped the QR code to the bottom of each poster and hung them in the hall.  Visitors can scan the QR code to see a picture of "from the future" of each of my students doing the job they researched!

Swing by my blog or catch my weekly live show on Facebook (Mondays at 8 P.M. EST) for more technology integration ideas!