Students will soon be back in the classrooms. The fall of 2021 will see some return to normalcy. However, this does not mean business as usual. Some changes made during online learning are likely here to stay. Many students will not be returning to school. Parents are still worried about the new variants making their way across the globe. And those under the age of 12 are still unvaccinated. So school districts need to make accommodations for those families.
But, as we prepare to teach those students who do return, lesson plans will look a bit different. This past year, though difficult for many students, showed us some real plusses to online learning. Teachers used videos of their instruction in order to reach those who couldn’t or just didn’t log in. The value of a video lesson, on top of an in-person lesson, is that students can go back and review the lesson a second time. As adults, we often watch Youtube videos more than once in order to learn something new. This will give students that extra boost they may need to understand a new concept.
Another plus to teaching with an online program is the need of teachers to differentiate among students of different abilities. Navigating through platforms like Google Classroom, we were able to easily assign different lessons to different students, without them every knowing. Giving more challenging assignments to students who are ready, or more basic assignments to those who are struggling, is easily done online. We can teach them where they are at.
And teachers are also much more tech savvy than ever before. The value of students interacting with an online lesson, is that they learn more digital skills that they will definitely need to know. We realize how much students missed out on hands-on lessons, which we look forward to bringing back, yet at the same time digital is still a crucial part of our lessons. So the new post-Covid classroom will be a combination of hands-on and digital lessons. A great assessment for the beginning of this new school year will be one that assesses their digital skills. Many students quickly learned to drag and drop, insert text boxes, and add special characters to a Google slide decks. Yet, we need to know how many students actually mastered those skills, and who did not.
One of my first assignments for the 2021/2022 school year is a fun, engaging, digital assessment that requires students to insert different shapes, fill them with different colors, and add borders of different sizes. They are asked to insert Google Images and size them to fit on a Google slide. Arrows are inserted into a slide, and students must rotate them different directions, change their width and length and color them with the “fill color” feature of Google Slides. On another slide, students must type a paragraph about a favorite activity, using different fonts, type size and colors. And finally, they learn to insert special characters, such as emojis, map icons, and mathematical symbols. If you’d like to start the school year with an idea where your students digital skills lie, try this fun assessment that will give you some real information about their digital skills.
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