Online Teaching

     As this pandemic continues many of us are learning that our first day of school will be online. This will be a different kind of year! Each of us are wrapping our minds around how to make our class work via Zoom, Google Meet, or Teams.  Each have features that we have to learn AND teach our students how it works on their end.  

    I think how can I keep my class as normal as possible.  My routines and lessons won't have to change much, just how I deliver them. As I watch other teachers on YouTube teach virtually, I am relieved that many of them aren't doing much different than I did when I was live in class.

    So when I think about what I do in my classroom, I started thinking about how to deliver these items virtually, which led me to creating a digital Student of the Week resource. Students can still do this fun activity, where I tend to learn something about a student I didn't know before they presented their poster.  

    When I think about the struggles of a student filling out this resource, I've brainstormed how to solve it. I think students will easily figure out how to type on the digital poster BUT what if taking a photo and inserting it is too much for them.  I then though, NO PROBLEM, I'll take their picture.  If you are thinking how, this is what I would do, have the student pose in Zoom, Meet, or Teams, whatever platform you are using, then take a screen clip of them. Did you know there is a short cut to do this?  In this order click and hold these keys windows+shift+s, you will get cross hairs that you can click and drag across the screen.  It automatically saves to your clipboard. Then go to the digital poster and paste it (ctrl+v). 

    If you have a Mac the shortcut is shift+command+4, drag the crosshairs across the area you'd like to snip. The screenshot saves to your desktop as "Screen Shot [date] at [time].png". 

Made in both as Google Slides and PowerPoint.Or how about playing games online? How about Color and Shape Bingo? It's one of the first games we play as a class.  So why not play it digitally online?  There are 40 bingo cards, why not share the presentation with them and they pick their card?  The flashcards can be printed out for the teacher and s/he shows them the color and shape if this is the beginning of kindergarten so they can check that they covered the correct color and shape.  The first time played directions on how to move the pieces and how to pick the card will need to be explicit.  BUT how much fun would this be to keep a game that you used to play live, can now be digital?  You can do this small group (which I'd recommend until everyone learns how to play) or it can be whole group!

Made in both Google Slides and PowerPoint.

Good luck with this new and unusual first day of school!