One of my children found this on their travels on the information super highway (for those of you who remember that name).
Unbeknownst to me, a student created a Pokemon card about himself and our class. I remember introducing my class to the Pokemon card generator online but never seeing this card. It was such a nice find.
This reminded me of one of the big successes I was part of this year. On a referral I was part, the school team and I were working on a visual system for a student. Off hand, I suggested creating a Pokemon-card visual system. Simply put, the visual system would be used as a shape-of-the-day agenda co-decided between the student and the educators. To make the materials more subtle and engaging (student was intermediate and didn’t want his peers to see him using a visual), I mentioned using a Pokemon card generator.
The card would represent subjects (Ex. Social Studies, P.E.), items (Ex. binder, writing materials), and preferred activities / choices (Ex. iPad, sensory room). The cards would be put in card sleeves; the kind used for hockey cards. The pages would be kept in a binder; this would make it blend in with the school materials. As a school team, the educators decided how to set the pages to make it functional as a schedule.
I sent the link and didn’t think much more of it. A few weeks later I followed up about the student’s progress and, to my surprise, the teacher sent this:
I was speechless from amazement. The feedback from the educators was that the student was enthusiastic to use it. It was inevitable that his peers saw the binder of Pokemon cards and a lot of interest resulted about it once word got around. Eventually, he felt comfortable sharing it and it ended up being something that served as a shared interest between the student and his peers for positive interactions and friendship building opportunities.
It was so encouraging to be part of that process; seeing an idea I mentioned come to life and getting to work with educators who are so talented and motivated to support this student.
The link for the card generator I suggested is here: https://www.pokecard.net/
It’s free! Can’t go wrong with that.
Note: It also does “Magic: The Gathering” cards and “Yu-Gi-Oh” cards. Links are at the bottom of Pokecard website.
The cards can be personalized in many ways but not completely. Once you generate the card:
- Right-click on the card image and choose “Open Image in New Tab” from the menu.
- In the tab, right-click on the image and choose “Save image as.” Choose a name and directory for the image and save.
There are other generators online if this one doesn’t fit your needs. There are also other themed-card generators too (though some require payment).
This system is very time-heavy to set-up but I believe you’ll get the return from student engagement. I’m looking forward to trying this with other educators in the upcoming school year.
