Wrapping Up the Year in the Online Classroom

The end of the year is usually filled with fun and engaging activities to help our kiddos close out the time spent in their grade level. From field trips to field days, and class parties to proms, students enjoy being with friends and teachers in structured activities without the stress of grades and tests. While in the online learning classroom, there are ways to bring the school year to a close that can provide the same level of camaraderie and completeness.

• The Picture Slideshow
• You can still put together the end of the year slideshow for the students. Create a Google Slides presentation. Assign each student a slide. Have them fill the slide with pictures, quotes, clip art, etc. to show their personality and showcase who they are. You could even work with a team of teachers to incorporate a class set of slides from each teacher into one grade level slide show. Add audio. Publish to the web. Or screencast to turn the slides into a video. Share with the class or grade level through Google Classroom, an email link, or a teacher website.

• The Tips and Tricks Letter to the Next Grade Level - By Video
• The usual letter we have our kiddos write to the incoming class can still be a thing. Even better, we can have students create videos with those tips and tricks for the incoming students using tools like screencastify, screencast-o-matic, or nimbus - even Flipgrid if you already have parent permissions to use the app.
• Try having students create a video trailer for your class instead of recording themselves. Turn your classroom into the next best seller or theater blockbuster.
• Send a Personal Message to Each Student
• Those video conferencing tools have been a great way to communicate with students in this online environment. Use a video tool to record or live stream a meeting to send a personal message to your kiddos.
• End of the Year Memes
• Have kiddos sum up their year by creating an end of the year meme. Use this drawing to get started with younger kiddos. Make a copy to use for your class. Use this site for older students to choose their own images for a meme. 

• Use LucidPress to Make an End of Year Magazine
• LucidPress is an app that connects through your Google Drive and can provide a collaborative environment for creating publications. It has a ton of cool templates for creating things like digital magazines. Have kids create the top stories of the year to add to the year in review.

• Word Snapshots
• A project we do at the end of every year is Word Snapshots. Students come up with several categories: News/Current Events, Movies, Musics, TV, Foods, Friends, Family, Pets, etc. Then they list as many things for the category as they can. Then they create a poster.  When  we do this f2f, the students color coordinate their categories.  However, there are a couple ways your could translate this into a digital assignment using Google Drawing, Canva, Pictochart, or even just making word clouds with the words using Word Art (https://wordart.com ) The object of the poster is to have a snapshot of the important things in students' lives at this time! Students can look back years later and see what was happening this year!

• Video Conference with a Guest Speaker
• Find someone in the community that will speak to your class using Google Meet or some other video conferencing tools.
• Need help finding a commencement speaker? Try using this site made specifically for that task! https://www.guestcommencementspeeches.com/ 

Rubrics In Google Classroom

Using custom rubrics in Google Classroom is a fabulous way to give student feedback!
When starting an assignment in Google Classroom you can immediately add a rubric to establish the criteria for the assignment and determine student accomplishment.

In your rubric you can either add the criteria points or not add the criteria points.

Maybe DON'T add the criteria points. This approach will force students to READ about their accomplishment and not just scan for the numbers, their grade.
Several things could occur:

• This will make students read the GOOD and the not so good feedback from you to see how they performed. 
• Give yourself more assurance that the time you took to provide feedback was looked at and hopefully learned from. 
• Have the students respond to the rubric feedback via private message to the teacher to receive their points (score).  
• Students will make changes to improve their work and then resubmit after reading all the great feedback. Hopefully reaching mastery.

Google Classroom has the tool built in for you to build a rubric.

Here is a video showing how to build your rubrics using their tool.

REUSE YOUR RUBRICS!
By the way you can always reuse a rubric you have already built. This is a fabulous option! You can even make adjustments to the reused rubric and or rename it. The next time you reuse a rubric you will see the original and the one with adjustments as choices for the future.

There is a way to upload a rubric from a Google Spreadsheets. 

Below is a template you can use to make your rubric via a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets are easier to share with other teachers!

There are two templates. 
Click file and make a copy. Keep a master for yourself.

• One to add points to
• One where points are not added. 

Media Literacy Tools and Resources

Media Literacy, and the critical thinking that is required as part of our everyday lives and all the media we see and hear, is becoming a vital skill with which many of our kiddos struggle. Only 44% of kids felt they could tell fake news stories from real ones. 31% of kids have shared a news story online only to find out later that it was wrong or inaccurate. Check out other interesting facts from this study done by Common Sense Media!

So here are some resources that might help kids evaluate news and information!

ELEMENTARY K-2 Here are two books that help evaluate commercials and tv advertisements.

ELEMENTARY AND INTERMEDIATE

Here are a couple of videos with some good introductions to Media Literacy and the 5 questions that every student needs to know to ask.

What is Media Literacy?

5 Essential Media Literacy Questions for Kids

Elementary and Intermediate Resources:

• Media Education Lab Media Literacy Units: https://mediaeducationlab.com/assignment-media-literacy

• Tackling Fake News: Strategies for Teaching Media Literacy: https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/blog-posts/john-depasquale/2017/Tackling-Fake-News--Strategies-for-Teaching-Media-Literacy/

• If your campus has Brainpop - Here are some of the resources for Media Literacy they provide! https://www.brainpop.com/technology/digitalcitizenship/medialiteracy/

• Here is an interesting game that works through the manipulation of information online and why it happens from the perspective of the fake news "bad guys": https://getbadnews.com/droggame_book/junior/#intro 

• And don't forget the TISD Digital Citizenship Curriculum and Be Internet Awesome unit Don't Fall for Fake:
• Elementary: https://sites.google.com/tomballschools.net/instructionaltechnology/digital-leadership/elem-scope-sequence
• Intermediate: https://sites.google.com/tomballschools.net/instructionaltechnology/digital-leadership/int-scope-sequence

MIDDLE AND HIGH SCHOOL

• This is where the topic really takes off.  Social Media, including YouTube and Facebook, are the primary source of news for tweens and teens.  How do we know what is true and not true???

• Here is a great site for Civic Online Reasoning from Stanford University: https://cor.stanford.edu/

• Media Education Lab Media Literacy Units: https://mediaeducationlab.com/assignment-media-literacy

• Here are a bunch of lessons with videos as the hook, that go a little deeper in exploring those 5 essential questions and show how to really look at news and advertising: http://mediasmarts.ca/media-literacy-101

• NewseumED does a great job of providing news, but also in evaluating and analyzing. Here are two great resources:
• https://newseumed.org/medialiteracy
• https://newseumed.org/edcollection/media-literacy-booster-pack

• Here is an interesting game that works through the manipulation of information online and why it happens from the perspective of the fake news "bad guys": https://getbadnews.com/#intro   

• And don't forget the TISD Digital Citizenship Curriculum with Common Sense Media: https://sites.google.com/tomballschools.net/instructionaltechnology/digital-leadership/juniorhigh-school-scope-and-sequence

If you have other great resources and want to share, drop us a line and let us know! We are always looking for great resources!