Corgi Interactive Graphic Organizers

Explore Corgi, an interactive graphic organizer tool that is free and can help scaffold student development of key critical thinking skills.

Teaching in a Tech-Empowered Classroom
Grades K-12 5 min Resource by:
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Corgi is a collection of interactive graphic organizers that students can use to make sense of their learning and guide them through critical thinking processes.

This tool was developed by the team at CAST, in collaboration with the University of Kansas, the National Science Foundation, IDEAs That Work, and Texthelp.

Templates

There are four different templates available:

  • Cause and Effect: Explore the relationship between an event, its causes, and its effects.
  • Question Exploration: Break down an essential question, respond to it, and connect that question to broader understandings.
  • Comparison: Describe similarities and differences between two concepts.
  • Claim, Evidence, Reasoning: Examine a claim and then determine if that claim is supported by evidence.

Because these four options are not content-specific, they can be used in nearly any classroom.

This image shows the four template choices: cause and effect, question exploration, comparison, and claim, evidence, reasoning

How Does Corgi Work?

To begin, you will need to set up a free account and allow limited access to your Google Drive.

Once you have an account, you can begin by either choosing a lesson from the integrated library, or you can create a new query guide based on one of the four templates.

If you choose the lesson library, you’ll find that all of the sample lessons are aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Even if you’re not a science teacher, these lessons can provide templates and ideas that you can modify to meet the needs of your curricular area.

If you decide that you want to create your own guide, you’ll need to click on one of the four template options and then give it a name.

From there, you will be taken to a screen that outlines the steps in the graphic organizer that you’ve chosen. For cause and effect, for example, you would see that students will be guided through steps that include identifying an essential question, defining key terms in a main event, and then listing out causes, effects, and relationships between the items. Finally, students will be asked to summarize their learning before being presented with an option to engage in an extension activity. If it helps to see a flowchart version of these steps, you can click on the Organizer tab on the left side of the screen.

This screenshot shows the organizer fields to the left with a list of cause and effect steps to the right.

As a teacher, you can choose to pre-fill parts of the organizer or leave it blank for students to complete on their own. If you think that students may need some specific guidance along the way, you can add custom directions or resources for any of the steps in the organizer by clicking the Instruction tab on the left side of the screen.

This screen shot shows the drop down menu where teachers can add scaffolds: images, youtube videos, and links from Drive.

For instance, if you want to provide some context for the essential question, you could add an explanation, additional directions, images, embedded YouTube videos, or links to resources in your Google Drive. These can be helpful scaffolds for students who need a little extra support, and they can cut down on the number of questions that you’ll need to answer as students work on the guide.

This screenshot shows four options: create a slide presentation, share this guide, print/save to PDF, and post to Google Classroom.

When you get the guide ready to share, you can click the Share icon at the bottom of the screen and share it in one of four ways:

  • Transform the guide into a Google Slides presentation to share with your students.
  • Share the guide via a Google link.
  • Print the guide or save it as a PDF.
  • Post the guide as an assignment to Google Classroom.

Students will have similar options when they complete their version of the guide, so you can have them use one of these features to submit their work to you. If you use Google Classroom, the ability to turn it in is integrated right into the process. If you use another learning management system, students could share their document by uploading a file or sharing a link.

This screenshot shows the widget that is embedded at the top of the screen. There are four circles with icons under them. The first is play. The second is stop.

To make the experience more accessible, CAST has integrated several accessibility tools into the workspace. At the top, there are options to have text read aloud and to be translated into Spanish. There’s also an integrated dictionary that allows students to look up words with which they might be unfamiliar.

If you are looking for other graphic organizers and templates built on either the Google or Microsoft platforms, you may also want to check out the free digital templates and graphic organizers at AVID Open Access. There are over 100 of them available.

AVID Connections

This resource connects with the following components of the AVID College and Career Readiness Framework:

  • Instruction
  • Rigorous Academic Preparedness
  • Student Agency
  • Insist on Rigor
  • Break Down Barriers
  • Align the Work

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Topic Collections

This course is part of the following collections:

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