Friday, August 26, 2016

If you are a Google Classroom user, you will LOVE the new updates!  If you haven't tried using it yet, this might be the year to start.  It's a dashboard that will save you so much time while managing lessons and student work.  Here's a summary of the new features:

August 2016
  • Guardian summaries: Teachers and administrators can invite guardians to sign up for email summaries to keep up with their students. Guardians can choose how often to get a summary—daily or weekly—and can unsubscribe at any time. Summaries include a student’s missing or upcoming work as well as new announcements and questions posted by teachers in the class stream.
  • Topics for stream organization: Teachers can organize the class stream by adding topics to posts. Teachers and students can filter the stream by topic.
  • Teachers and students can preview materials attached to assignments or posts.
  • Teachers and students can view email notifications by class using Inbox by Gmail. Important updates from recent emails are highlighted in each bundle.
  • Teachers can add a subject when creating a class.
New mobile app features:
  • Mobile annotations: Teachers and students can draw on, highlight, and write notes on documents and PDFs in the Classroom mobile app.
  • Teachers can poll their students using multiple-choice questions and allow students to see a summary of their classmates' answers.
  • On Apple® iOS®, teachers can post to multiple classes. 
There were many other updates made in 2016 to make this one of the most popular and easy to use management systems in schools today.  Click HERE to read about more capabilities of the program.  If you are looking for a one-stop-shop for classroom organization, this tool is amazing! 

Disclaimer: No, I am not getting ANY kickbacks from Google, for promoting Classroom!  But I want to help make your lives easier and this might do the trick!

Monday, August 22, 2016

Start Up Meetings for the New School Year

Hello staff,

Welcome back!  I am excited to start a new school year at Friendship and Holmes, continuing as your innovative learning coach.  This week, I will spend all of Monday at Friendship and all Tuesday at Holmes. I would love to start meeting with staff to think about the new school year.  

This is a great time to plan for communication management both within, and outside the classroom walls.  Think about how you can create a community of learners in your class with the many tools we have at our fingertips.  Here are a few ideas we can talk about and set-up together...

-Google Classroom (Manages assignments, due dates, messages, and more, all in one user-friendly dashboard for teachers.)

-Google Calendar (A place for students to stay organized and see assignments posted in Google Classroom)

-Remind (Parents and students receive updates via text message)
-Hapara (How can it help me?)

-Teacher or class Twitter (Sharing and connecting with others)

-Skyward (How can I email parents?)

-Google Forms (Creating interest inventories, sign-ups, etc.)

These are just a few of the more common tools to help facilitate communication with your students and parents.  If you would like to share your thoughts, I would love to plan with you and/or your team, to help you get rolling!

As always, I'm just an email away, or you can click on the link below to book a time.

I wish everyone a great start to the school year!