Course Artifacts

Our second course of the summer is coming to an end, and now we can all breathe a little easier! But in all honesty, I get a lot out of these classes and it's been time well-spent. 

One of my favorite assignments that we completed for this course was creating a digital badge pathway and badge. The tool that I use the most with my first-graders is Seesaw, so I created a pathway focused on making an introductory post that I plan on using with them at the beginning of the year. I really appreciate when we have the opportunity to create something in class that we can actually use in our own classrooms. As teachers we have so little time, so to "feed two birds with one seed" is always helpful! 

Although I do really like the idea of digital badges, I'm struggling a bit to figure out how I can use them with my students. I'm not sure where they can display their badges since we have a shared iPad environment and don't utilize Google Classroom or anything similar. I was considering maybe printing out the badges for the students to hang in their lockers? Although that wouldn't quite make them "digital" anymore. I'm still thinking through the logistics. Any suggestions are welcome! 




One of my personal goals as a teacher has been to find a way to help my students set goals for themselves and be more reflective. So when the "Student Self-Assessment Plan - Goal Setting Sheet - Reflection Activity" came up in one of our modules, I was pretty excited! Again, I could "feed two birds with one seed" and do the same work for both the course and my classroom. I decided to focus this activity on math constructed responses because that's been a building-wide focus for us since last year. For the goal planning sheet I created a form to require as little writing as possible (because first-graders), while still being personal for each student. I know that It's going to take a lot of modeling and brainstorming before the students can complete a goal planning sheet independently, but if we start at the beginning of the year I think they'll get there! I designed the reflection activity to be completed on Seesaw because the students will be familiar with the tool (we use Seesaw daily) and the reflection can be shared with both me and their parents. I wrote out the directions and also recorded voice instructions so that all of the students, regardless of reading level, will be able to complete the activity. 





So even though summer is flying by, it helps to have these new ideas ready to go for this coming school year!