Back to School 20-21

The start of every school year causes both excitement and anxiety, especially this year. After wrapping up my first week, I'm feeling overwhelmed yet confident in the fact that I know we can do this. It WILL look differently but yes, we can! By we, I mean teachers, students, administrators, and families. It takes a village! 

We want our students to be independent learners, good problem solvers, and responsible global citizens, because they have to be. We will have a lot of opportunity to fine tune these skills, because we have to. It will take time especially at the beginning of the school year as we learn new routines and tools for learning both hybrid or remote. I am working remotely with a substitute, who is AWESOME, for 4 of my hybrid classes. In addition to these classes I teach 2 remote classes on a 2 day rotation. On day 1, remote group A meets with me virtually and remote group B completes asynchronous activities. On day 2 these classes switch. Each Friday, everyone is remote. Hybrid students meet remotely and my remote class, depending on the rotation day, completes an asynchronous activity.

To kick off my classes we started working with a handful of tech tools as we focused on getting to know each other, Zoom, Google Classroom, Jamboard, AnswerGarden, and Flipgrid. This will be the focus of my classes for at least the first two weeks of school before we dive into content. Lucky for me I teach digital literacy and computer science so everything we do is related. 

We started with a quick review of safety. They could relate to wearing masks when we talked about seeing your breath in the winter when it is cold outside. Even though we can't see if now, it is still there and we need to keep each other safe. Next we jumped into one of my new favorite tools, Jamboard. The goals were to 

1) learn about tech tools the kids are familiar with or using and 

2) to show them a tool that we will utilize and talk about how they might use it for other classes. Like brainstorming and entrance tickets to identify prior knowledge!

Students shared ideas using the prompt "What’s your favorite APP or program tool?" as they considered tools that might be used for learning. This is what they shared. As students will work remotely at least one day a week, Jamboard could be a great collaboration tool for them to use if working in groups with friends. Below is a screen capture from one of my classes.

The next activity was to find out "What are you excited to learn about in this class?" which we talked about after reviewing the course description. To do this I used a word cloud generator called AnswerGarden. Students enter their 20 character or less response in the text box and in real time the word cloud is built. Below is an example. We talk about the frequency of responses as they relate to the size of the words and how literal computers are, "coding robotics" is different from "coding robots."

To learn more about each other we are working on two activities for sharing and learning more about each other. The first is FlipGrid. Where do I begin? This engaging tool has a lot to offer, and it's fun. For this activity, students record a short video to introduce themselves then find and respond to 2 different friends to either tell them something they have in common or to ask a question about something they shared. It's a great way to get to know something about all of our friends at school.

Some things I learned about my students:

• I have budding authors in one of my fifth grade classrooms. Yes, they are already writing books.
• There are many video game players as well as aspiring NHL and pro soccer players. A few want to travel to Europe, some to open bakeries. :) 
• There are lots of Stranger Things and Roblox fans. Of course I was excited that one of my girls wants to be the greatest coder in the world. 
• And we can't forget about those pets that we love so dearly or the aspiring musicians.
• Many kudos to the moms, dads, siblings, and others that so many look up to. 

There are many more I could share but the biggest joy from this activity was how the kids connected with each other using this digital platform. 

On deck! "What's in a Name?" Another getting to know each other activity. Students will research and discuss their names with family and create a short presentation to tell us about their name. Unless they are "first of my name," then how cool is that! A trailblazer. In UDL fashion they have options for sharing when they present on Monday, September 28. I found this idea in one of my books "Virtual Team Building Book." If you have other ideas for name related themes or questions, please share them in the comments section below. 

Students shared so many amazing things about their names. We even had a few "first born of her/his name." In fact in some students found that their names are name days in other countries. I deemed yesterday, October 1, the name day for one of the kids as they didn't see their name on that list. Some shared stories from their families about why they were given their name, others enjoyed looking at the popularity of their name in different countries or at different times in history. My favorite was the meaning of their names. We had everything from "crooked nose" to "ruler of the house" to "peace maker" and "gift." 

Lastly, I'm looking for ways to share tips and tricks for some of the tools we are using as questions come up in my communities. If you have a favorite trouble shooting tip or suggestion for any tools, I'd love to hear about them. Come back to see any newly incorporated ideas as this is a continuous work in progress. This was created using the Google Slides Master feature. Click the binder tabs to go to different sections. To advance the pages, simply click anywhere on each slide.