I am so excited to share some new things this season like a brand new opening that you just saw and using Wakelet to archive resources from each episode. In the video description area on YouTube, you will now find a link to Wakelet, where you can view the resources mentioned in that episode. Also, in the description area, I’ve learned that if you put timestamps to specific sections of the video, it will automatically create a link, which viewers can click on to jump to that section.
In the first episode of every new season, I gather up ideas from across the Internet for the first week of school that will help you and your students get to know each other and get started on a great path for the rest of the year.
Things are definitely different this year and many school districts across the country will be starting things remotely or using a hybrid of face to face and online learning, so it’s even more important for our students to know who we are and in return, know who they are!
As I was preparing for trainings for the fall and reflecting on everything that has happened since March, I was startled to realize that we are getting brand new students in the fall! When the pandemic hit, we had already built those key relationships with our current students, but now it’s all different because we will be a new person in the lives of our students and vice versa.
The way we build these relationships this year won’t be done in a typical way, but I really can’t stress enough about taking time to get to know your students during this first week of school and let them know you are there to support them.
I hope the ideas in this episode will help you build these key relationships, so let’s jump into these ideas!
GETTING TO KNOW YOU ACTIVITIES
In the last episode of season 4, I shared Debbie Holman’s idea for Flipgrid goodbye messages at the end of the school year using their augmented reality QR codes. So now that it’s the beginning of the year, why not “flip” that idea around?
You could record one message, or several if you want, to all of your new students and send them a QR code on a postcard, welcoming them and introducing yourself! I think it would be a fun way for students to get to know you! And don’t forget, Flipgrid has the ability to upload videos too, so you could create your video using another tool and upload it to use Flipgrid’s augmented reality or you could just record a video, upload it to YouTube and make a QR code out of the URL.
I’m sure there are several ways you could do this! If you have other ideas, leave a comment here on the blog or on YouTube!
If you’re looking for an easier way to use Flipgrid though, try this next idea. I absolutely love the Twitter educator community who are willing to share ideas such as this one from Jake Miller, although he admits that he got the idea from someone else on Twitter, but can’t remember who.
Before school starts, create a grid topic just for student introductions, where your students can introduce themselves and you can hear the correct pronunciation of their name while also starting to put names and faces together. Send students a message via your LMS with the link to the grid.
And it’s even easier than ever to view student responses as Flipgrid has made the teacher dashboard interface cleaner with less clicks.
I’ve also linked to 16 Ways to Use Flipgrid for the first day of school.
This next idea is so very cool and I’ve been really excited to share it! Last spring, I saw a tweet from teacher Mr. Jeans, showing examples of his students creating self-portraits. Students lay down on a flat surface like the floor or a bed and put all of the things important to them or describes more about themselves on the surface surrounding their head and then have another person snap a picture. My first thought was what a great project for this social media engaged generation! I could totally see this on Instagram or Snapchat and in fact, it reminds me of this photography style on Instagram called flatlay. This is where you take a photo from directly above the subject. So you take a flat surface that serves as the backdrop for the subjects of the photo, where the subjects are items that have been arranged on the surface like a vignette and lay flat in place. It also looks a lot like artist’s Gregg Segal’s work, seen here. Students could research Segal and get inspired by his works and create their own.
When I read through the comments on this tweet, I also found a different approach from another teacher suggesting students show the masks society wears and why they are worn, which I think is a good contrasting assignment too.
If you do this as an assignment with your students, you don’t have to take the real social media route. Instead, I suggest checking out Ditch That Textbook’s social media templates. Matt has templates for Instagram, Tik Tok, and more. So once students have a photo, they can add it to the template and turn it in. If you’re face to face for this project, you can set up a digital gallery walk on laptops. If you’re doing remote learning, set this up a little differently. Go to Ditch That Textbook’s website and get the different templates. Use the force copy link and share via your LMS.
Make sure to give your students a choice as to which medium they will use, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. and allow them to design their self-portrait. Turning it in will be a little different because we want everyone in the class to see each other’s self-portraits. Create a separate Google Slide Deck that has the same number of slides as you have students. Leave them blank. Share the file with your students and give edit access; making this a collaborative slide deck.
Then assign each student a slide. Have them open the template with their design and this second deck. Students will click on the design in the template and copy it. Then move to the second deck and paste it onto their assigned slide. Now, everyone will be able to see each other’s work! You could even send a link out to parents with view only rights to show off your student’s work as well.
Now, here’s a little bonus! I’ve put together this activity for you! If you have Canvas, I’ve created a module and shared it to the Commons, where you can download it and add it to your course. It includes resources to help students understand what a Flat Lay photo is and a planning sheet with guiding questions that will help them decide what should be in their self-portrait. There’s also a teachers’ note to help you with how to set this up for remote learning.
If you don’t have Canvas, don’t fear! I’ve put the resources in a Google Doc that you can copy and paste as needed.
Keeping in line with our self-portrait theme, back in June, I attended the Kahoot EDU Summit and learned about #selfiekahoots from Carol Salva. Apparently, when you get a job at Kahoot, you are asked to make a Kahoot about yourself so your new colleagues can get to know you. What a cool idea, right?
Carol loved this idea too and it’s been a huge hit with the teachers she’s shared it with! It’s an awesome activity for students to get to know you. If you’re online when starting school, not a big deal, just use the new Challenge mode that allows students to go through the Kahoot in a self-paced mode.
Then turn the tables! Have students create their own #SelfieKahoots! When completed, they can copy and paste the URL into a Google Form and you can share out the accompanying spreadsheet with the entire class and let students take turns playing each other’s Kahoots.
What’s even better is that Kahoot now allows for images to be added to questions and answer choices, so your Kahoots can be really visually appealing and engaging!
At the end of the year, you could ask students to take your #selfieKahoot again to see how much they remember and what they’ve learned about you over the course of the year.
TRANSITION TO ACADEMICS
Once you’ve started building these key relationships, it’s time to focus a little more on your classroom environment and make the shift towards academics. One of the best activities for this transition is called #Apps Day. This is THE IDEAL way to start the school year off right, especially one that probably starts out with remote learning. I learned about #AppsDay at the 2019 VSTE Conference in December. Designed by educators Patrick Hausammann and Phil Strunk, this HyperDoc activity will introduce students to the tools you want to use throughout the year and give them time to practice with the tools in a stress free way. There’s no pressure to have to learn a new tool AND add content.
On the left side column, students view a quick tutorial for how to use the tool. Then in the right column, students receive a simple task such as creating a top ten list of their favorite foods or movies and a place to add a link to their finished product. It gives you more information about your students while demonstrating that they know how to use the tool.
Several of my colleagues at MPHS used #AppsDay at the beginning of the spring semester and really liked it. You can edit the template for your own use and add your own tools and final products.
Two other activities to start thinking academically is to have your students learn about what is coming up in class this year in this one-two punch by John Meehan. First, hook your students by creating a course trailer – like a movie trailer that showcases what units, projects and themes they will be learning. Make it fun and creative! You can check out my Wakelet collection on course movie trailers for inspiration. Then have students go through your Syllabus in a gamified way.
But instead of me telling you about this, why don’t I have John tell you about it in more detail? Here’s John Meehan:
“Hi everybody! My name is John Meehan, I’m the author of a book called Edrenaline Rush, which is all about game changing student engagement, inspired by theme parks, mud runs, and escape rooms. And today, I want to talk to you about a way to change the game in your classroom from the very first day of school.
If it’s summer, if it’s the weekends, you can go for a walk, you can be in nature, you can just make a mess, you can go for a mud run or an escape room, where you can make your own decisions and ultimately you were in charge of which path you choose, right?
That’s very fun and very exciting about that. But we get in our traditional classrooms, all that fun goes away, then comes rows of desks and teachers talking. We have so much procedural stuff in those early days of class that we know we need to get through. What winds up happening is all the joy of being outside and that excitement that was part of their summer, immediately gets sucked out of every student because they walk in and say, ‘well, school again, back to rules, back to rows,’ and they lose that sense of autonomy and agency and purpose.
So I said, ‘Is there a way that we can create some sort of game-based introduction to our class, where we would be able to accomplish a lot of the fun, the energy, the excitement of the Great Outdoors or whatever the theme is for you, may it’s space exploration or time travel, whatever it looks like.’ And then create a classroom that says, ‘before we go into the full year of study of whatever the content is we’re going to have to prepare for our trip as if we’re going on a big old outdoor adventure; you know packing up our hiking bags, or packing up our rocket ships, or packing up our time traveler machines.’ Whatever that looks like.
So I have some slides here, I’ll show up in the background. I have a book, like I said, it’s called Edrenaline Rush, you can find out more on my website, which is edrenalinerush.com, I’ll put that there on the screen. But let’s talk about it here, as an example of how we can change the game in our classrooms from day one.
First day of class, I’m sure you’re like me and you have a lot of procedural stuff to do, maybe sign up for text alerts or get students to give a short ‘about me’ survey or sign up for your LMS, whatever it looks like for your classroom. There’s a lot of things procedurally that need to get done. But the truth is, I don’t care if they sign up for text alerts before they join the LMS or whether they give me their parent survey before they give me their contact information.
In the end, at eight or nine or ten, whatever procedural tasks, but we can do it in pretty much any way we want to. So from the first day of class, I’ll take students and divide them into teams. I’ll say, ‘all right, blue team, green team, red team, orange team. On your mark, get set, go! We’re going to blast off into space, which team will be the first one to pack their rocket with all of the things that we need.’ And then students will compete against one another as a team, taking one of those look for items back to their desk group, working on it as a team.
If they get it right, they call me over, I say ‘you’re good to go’ and they’re moving onto the next station. If they don’t have it one hundred percent right when they call me, I’m like, ‘Oh, so close, I got to see three out of four, nope, four out of four; all right you guys are good and you’re moving on.’ So you can do pretty much anything you wanted to, if it’s the course syllabus, have them sign and return a document, have them sign up for text alerts or have them log into an LMS. Do an ‘about me’ survey, a face-to-face. Have them build a scoreboard in the background, where you try to keep track of which team is blasting off or racing ahead. And you’ve designed the number of modular stations, where it can be done in pretty much any order. A, B, C, D. D, C, A, B, etc., etc. But by the end of two or three periods, whatever that eighty or ninety minutes you need for the first couple days of procedural. Every student has completed every task.
At the end of those first two or three days, if for any reason they have not completed those tasks as a group to see which group quote ‘wins’, you have the opportunity to then say, ‘okay gang, we have only the rest of today’s class to get this done.’ Maybe you’ve allotted 100 minutes for this activity, for those procedural things up front. Ten stations, each take ten minutes a piece, and when we’re done, we are done. ‘Whatever your team does not get done in class, it becomes individually yours for homework.’
So there’s an agency, there’s an autonomy, there’s a sense of mastery and purpose and a little bit of team based speed behind it. Taking us back to the great outdoors then, it feels like you choose your path. There are many ways to get there, but try not to get wet. On your mark, get set, go! Right? The floor is lava. I found it’s really fun, really exciting, it’s a great way to sort of mix in some fun little ice breakers, because you as the teacher are spot checking them and telling them, three, four, five, six, seven, ten, times, ‘Hey! Nice work, you’re Bobby, right?’ Or getting to know a little bit about how your students learn or how they develop.
I’ll put a link here on the website, please feel free to take a look, hit me up, let me know how I can help. I’m on Twitter @meehanedu and my book is called Edrenaline Rush, it’s all about game-changing student engagement, inspired by theme parks, mud runs, and escape rooms. Because the big secret is we’re not actually teaching content, we’re teaching kids. And if we can get kids excited, they’ll jump through hoops of fire for us. So why not make a mess? Thanks, again; stay safe. Bye!”
Thanks John for sharing about Dream Rush and how our classrooms can be different from day one. I’ve read Edrenline Rush and used some of the activities from the book in professional development with my school and you may have seen my tweets on the Egg Dash challenge, just one of the amazing activities mentioned in the book. If you’re looking for ways to engage with your students over content and have lasting learning experiences, I would definitely check out John’s book and website.
LEARNING SCHEDULE
Another key element this school year, will be having a conversation with your students about a learning schedule. Give students a template and walk them through how to fill it out. Think about wake up times, meals, and when office hours are being scheduled. Also, have them think about what are their harder classes versus their easier ones and suggest tackling assignments for those harder courses first and get them out of the way! Then they can focus on the easier tasks. Create one for yourself as well and show students yours as a model.
EPISODE RESOURCES
That was A LOT to pack into one episode! But remember, all of the resources from today’s episode, as well as some extra tutorials I’ve added can be found in my Wakelet collection labeled Tech Tuesday Episode Notes. I’ve also added in past Tech Tuesday episodes featuring First Week Ideas, so you can see the ideas I’ve previously recommended. You can follow me on Wakelet at https://wakelet.com/@priesterdl or click the link in the description area below.
In light of changing situations and the number of possible resources teachers can use, I’ve decided to go back to having videos every two weeks for at least the first five episodes of the season. At the time of this recording, my district has chosen to use a Hybrid model and I feel like we all need more support at this time as we transition once again. So I’m hoping having episodes less spaced out will be more helpful to all of you. I’ll probably switch back to every three weeks once things are a little more settled.
Did you have a favorite idea from this episode? Or maybe you have additional ideas to share? Please comment below!
Ms Priester EDU 