How will you connect with remote students? Here are the basics you should start with if you are feeling unprepared.

Our school is using smore.com to make hyperlinked newsletters for families.

Here's how to use Schooltool to send BCC emails to families. Thanks Leah Besaw!

You use Google Email, but here are detailed skills that will make your life easier:

• How to make an email group for parents, students, grade level peers, and work team peers (ais, coteachers, ot, etc)
• How to make hyperlinked text--a clickable link using the chain icon so people aren't looking at a messy URL
• How to copy in a picture
• How to sort and flag emails in folders

So click that link above if you want help learning how to do any of that. I do not recommend using gmail as a connection point with young students. See the section below on google interactions for ways to communicate with them.

Another "basic" I suggest watching if you need it is this link to review on understanding classlink. It will show you how to set up, organize, and add apps.

If there is a child that you want to interact with I recommend making a Google doc. Think of a Google doc as a spiral-bound notebook. You can have a notebook that goes to a whole class, a small group of students, or individual students. Think of the old days when we passed spiral notebooks back-and-forth and a child would write and then you would write an answer back. Google Docs can work just like that.

You still have to get the child to notice the Doc, which means a family email asking them to ask the child to go to classlink and open Docs. I have a screencast for that. These products work in both directions: You can create them and send them to kids to use, or you can ask the students to create them and share them with you.

You should know how to modify and format font, add tables and pictures, and again, use hyperlinked text/pics, as well as sharing options. Those are foundational skills in Docs and Slides. Slides is going to come up next week in Reading Workshop as an interactive Reader Response Journal. Slides is a great alternative to a Doc for Writing Projects because it automatically helps them arrange their thoughts in groups, and makes them want to stretch their writing.

Classroom is a powerful tool. Once students know to go there and how to navigate, it’s a place a teacher can put all their educational files: videos, links, pdfs, etc. It can be a blog-like place where students can interact, as well as a traditional “assignment” scenario for completing coursework, organizing it for the teacher to see who is done and how they did.

I have 2 cautions about Classroom in this moment. Think of a 7 year old trying to learn how to do this on a cell phone without adult support. Because that’s what I think of every time I think of technology-based education now. Classroom is a BIG jump in navigational skills from Docs/Slides. I recommend that if you begin to use Classroom with your students, you really need to cut a screencast showing them how to navigate around it in the ways you expect.

The other caution is that you can’t set up an interactive place and be absent. Just like with FlipGrid or SeeSaw, you are making a commitment, too. If the kids are talking to each other, then you need to be managing their behavior and content in that space, which means checking in more often than once a day.

If both of those cautions set you back from Classroom, let me say that there are places to host a collection of files such as a teacher website, seesaw, symbaloo, or s’more.

Forms (Surveys) is a great extension, too, that can be used for practical information gathering with families or as a math lesson because of the way it shows data in charts. However, I wouldn’t consider it base knowledge, like Docs and Slides. ALL of these "apps" come with templates which make it easy for you to modify an existing work. In Forms, those templates are more important. One thing I’d note is that kids LOVE taking surveys, and I’ve taught them how to create their own Forms before also. They think it’s “real” and love it.

We have access to wonderful digital resources. Some you can use for individual assignments, some you could use for projects, but all of them could be used as an "open reading" prompt just to point kids in new directions each week to keep things fresh.

While I have a RAZ account many of you might know the password of, and that's great for grabbing pdf's for Google Classroom, you may be happy to know that RAZ has opened up 3 months of product for free because of Covid19. So if you know the product and love it like I do, go forth and set up your classroom! The key benefit is that you can literally run guided reading through this website with the data they provide in quizzes. You can choose whether to restrict your kids to tight independent levels, assign individual books, or open the whole library.

Updated Epic info: Epic is giving 90 days free, but they are insisting that the families be the keeper of the login, clinging to their "gotcha" business model where schools can't buy this resource, only families can. It IS an outstanding resource, so if you want to go to this link and set it up, especially if you already used it during the school year, you can.

Scholastic News, Time for Kids, StoryWorks, Education.com, ReadWorks.org... if you have taught these before, use them now.

Here's a video review of our other library resources: notably Power Knowledge Life Science.

A note about PebbleGo, we only pay for 2 of their modules, but if families go to this website, they can get them ALL for free!

Here is an overview of another digital reading content resource that's been made free for schools. NewsELA reminds me of NewsOMatic which we used to have as an app when we had Ipads. If you just want to noodle through it on your own, here's the link to a free signup.

Once you ask families to create video and audio, everything becomes that much more technologically likely to break. There are also bandwidth/networking issues. But it is SO much more personal and engaging, I feel like you should go for it, esp if the closing lingers longer.

• Screencasting is the term for making a video of your desktop. This is a key skill when asking students to do technology from home. You probably saw my "how to login to classlink" video--that used an embedded camera that shared the desktop. But you can also just use a full screen camera setting to deliver a less than 5 minute instructional lecture. It is not 2-way. Here's how to screencast! This is it's own workshop.
• FlipGrid is delayed 2 way. The students make a short video in response to a text prompt (or linked video!) and then they can see other children's responses and *reply* back with another video! Here's an overview. Here's a short, kid version overview. Just like with Google Classroom: If you start a Flipgrid you need to be present! You need to be seen responding to their videos and correcting silly and incorrect use. Kristin is leading this workshop.
• Google Hangouts Meet will not work for our student logins due to age restrictions. For faculty, this is the easiest way to connect with coteachers. It's an extension (add it via Chrome Extension Store) that sits up in the corner, and you can click and see when your buddy is online and then either text chat or video chat.
• Asking people to FaceTime (Android people call it Video Call) on personal platforms is dicey. I don't recommend. Also, FaceTime won't talk to Video Calling. This is a nonstarter.
• Skype is an option to set up phone-to-phone video work, but it requires a client (download) which is a pain. Don't recommend for kids.
• Zoom is the easiest free video conferencing website. I found it very easy to use, and you can bring in a whole bunch of people... you could schedule a meeting at 11am and anyone who can join can login and see each other and talk!!! I recommend testing it out on a friendly, tech-capable family and then scale it up. Leah will lead this workshop.

• Brainpop and BrainpopJR have content that practically begs for flipped classrooms. Assign a video (accessible through classlink, not direct) and the students can respond with the prompt you leave (via FlipGrid!).
• Mystery Science is an incredible platform, and they built this science page just for schools in closure. Primary school pays for this, but it is now free to everyone.
• Kahoot is a key interactive site that generates fun game like quizzes where YOU can load the content, or choose pre-made-by-other-teachers "quizzes."
• Explain Everything is a website where students can record their voice as they write, draw, or solve equations. Great for open ended sharing of understanding for non typists and little people.
• Your Public Library has some sort of ebook platform. Sharing this with families will be IMPORTANT esp if we stay closed beyond 2 weeks. It is called various things, but at Victor there is Libby and Sora. Here are directions to access ebooks. This can go home to families.
• Freckle is one of the most complete, bizarrely-free, learning platforms I've seen. It is from the same company that runs Myon. For students who need more direction, this could be a game changer that lifts learning beyond generic prompts. Teachers would have to input their students, like we used to do for RAZ.
• Remember to cross-post any youtube content into safetube. This free website gives you a link that strips out all of the garbage popups, commercials, and autoplays in YouTube. Here's how.
• If you send kids out onto the internet to do open inquiry work (as opposed to sending them to a closed website like PK LifeScience), please remember to direct them to a safer browsing site than google. I recommend Kid Rex.

The school, via Jen’s “landing page” Instruction-At-Home smore newsletter, has provided a student-focused series of links a child can complete.

The child-focused smore newsletter is supposed to help provide them a structure. Our priority is reading. Getting kids to adhere to an agenda in which reading is their focus is critical. They should be completing some sort of independent reading, listening to a read aloud, reading their AIS provided materials, practicing fluency, and doing their word work. And if you can manage only one teacher-child interaction, I hope it is in support of this work--via a google Doc, FlipGrid, Seesaw, etc. For your families without internet, send encouragement to use a print reader response journal.

After you feel families have a handle on that, you are encouraging them to do their math practice and games.

Now, as you have been parked at home, you’ve been getting your own ideas. You’ve been learning too and want to try new things! Make sure as you send your students new options you are very specific about where in the day’s agenda this should go. Let’s not keep piling things on.

• If you send them your own read aloud, say “Instead of the read aloud in the school newsletter, listen to this.”
• “Instead of doing the school writing prompt in the newsletter, go to our classroom because I’ve got a new Doggo Opinion writing task for you there.”
• “Instead of the school’s fluency work, I want you to go to our FlipGrid and read to me there!”

Remember, every time you throw them a shiny new option, you are asking a family to make decisions about their daily agenda, and possibly disrupting their attempts to hold to one. It can't be a structure if it's unique every day. So telling them what specifically they should be replacing in their daily work would help.

Let's not pretend that any of this normal.

There is some incredible stuff out there on how to talk to kids about Covid19. I was impressed with this overview page from PBS, which has some professional development, some options you could use with kids, and a great prompt for project based learning, where the project is recording the child’s home-school situation as a student journalist. I loved this idea, as it straddles personal narrative, opinion, and informational writing. Students could record the emergence of spring out their windows and in their backyards, as well as their activities, worries and growth as they learn. One of my enrichment activities is going to be on How to Be a Reporter. Feel free to piggyback on it.

Meta-learning journals that record accomplishments are so good at helping kids take ownership, and it’s emotionally healthy, too. A “reporter’s notebook of daily life” is something citizens in Britain were asked to do during World War II to document the impact of the war. It’s something activists called for when Trump was elected to document the changes as the government began to alter perceptions of what was normal. It also helps hold a place to remember how life used to be. Writing our daily experience can be both an act of defiance, affirmation, and healing.

This activity could be done easily with a google Doc, leaving a place for you to respond to the student’s writing work with teaching comments for editing and revision (like stickies on the side) and also respond as a caring grownup, with your own response entries on the actual Doc. Because of the potentially personal nature of this "reporting" I don't recommend platforms like blogging comments into classroom or FlipGrid.

If this activity is begun, it needs to be maintained for either a run of days or as a regular weekly task, because the power of journalling is in the journey. The "project" isn't a single task, but a record that allows process and nuance. And as mentioned above, if it comes from the classroom teacher, that means you give up the school's writing assignments as this would replace those, which were thoughtfully designed to mimic school. And now you have potentially 24 docs to check once a week-- this is a commitment on your part, too.

PS: A great text to use in conjunction with this project is Love That Dog by Creech.