Start the New Semester With These Digital Tools

With a new semester comes a new beginning for both the student and teacher.  The student comes into your classroom with a clean slate.  You, the teacher, you have an opportunity to set the tone of your digital classroom by incorporating  tech tools into your teaching.  By using technology at the beginning of the year, your students will know that they’re in a 21st century classroom where you, by using technology, are going to prepare them for the world that awaits outside of class.

Below are a few tech tools you can use to get your semester off to an EdTech start:

Canva or Google Drawings:  Ask students to create a vision board about themselves.  With vision boards, students simply incorporate pictures that represent who they are, what they hope to learn, and what they want to be.  Students can browser the internet for the appropriate pictures and incorporate them into their board.  They can also use these tools to tell you about themselves by including pictures of family, favorite things, foods, places, and whatever else might be relevant to them.

Book Creator and Google Slides:  Ask students to write a short e-book about themselves.  Not only is Book Creator easy to use, but Google Slides can be fashioned to create e-books as well by changing a couple of settings, namely the aspect ration of the slides, making them look like pages in a book.  Students can include not only text, but pictures into their books as well.

Google Forms:  Create a student interest survey so you can learn more about what makes your students tick.  Ask students about their interests, hobby’s, favorite subjects, areas that they struggle in and so on.

Wakelet: Introduce students to Wakelet as a repository for their work.  Whether the teacher keeps one Wakelet for the entire class or each students keeps their own Wakelet, students can create digital portfolios as a place to keep copies of their work.  

Google Keep, Docs, and Slides:  Begin day one of the new semester by asking students to keep a daily journal.  This would be a great warm up activity or an exit ticket asking students to reflect on what they’ve learned that day.  All three Google tools are very good for students to keep a journal.  For example, in Google Slides, students write the date as the header and then use the rest of the slide for their journaling.  Each slide represents one entry.  

Again, begin the semester with the expectation that this will be a 21st century classroom.  You will be preparing students for life outside of your classroom walls and for their future careers.