Morning Commute

 Breakfast at my Kitchen Table

School office at my Kitchen Table

Bloomington is not a huge place.  My drive to school BCE (Before COVID Era) took only about 15-20 minutes.  

Now CE (COVID Era) my commute is 30 seconds.  I love it!

Since my district switched to all remote learning to begin the year, teachers were told that they could work from school or home.  I really appreciate the flexibility that they have given us.  It's nice to be able to go in to the building to get materials I need, which we couldn't do in the spring due to the Stay at Home Order.  For the most part, though, it's been more convenient to work from home, and I'm enjoying the short commute.

One risk of working from home is that you never physically leave work to go home, so you never stop working.  I've been intentional the first few teacher prep days in switching out my tulip quilt for my German flag quilt in the morning at 7:30 when I "go to work."  Then, when I'm done for the day, I turn off my laptop (instead of just putting it in sleep) and switch the quilts back.  It feels a little silly, and I don't know that I'll always do this, but so far it's helping me remember that it's healthy to be done for the day and to focus on non-school things.

Video Success!

After my struggles trying to record a lesson using Microsoft Teams on Wednesday, I am very happy to report that things went much better the following day using Zoom.

I was able to record a 10 minute introductory video for students and families.  This is pretty much the talk I would normally give at Open House.

I also made a video of the lesson for the first day of school, which teaches students how to ask and answer "What's your name?"

After a busy but wonderful weekend helping a friend drive her son to his first year of college, I'm back home with 2 more days of prep before school starts on Wednesday.

Notebooks: BCE and CE

BCE (Before COVID-Era): 

In previous years I have given my students guided notes handouts which are hole punched for them to keep in a German binder.

I love my guided notes, but about 25% of my students refuse to organize their notes in a binder and just stuff them into a folder or their backpacks.  It drives me crazy!

I also worry that giving them this much structure may be doing them a disservice in the long run as it doesn't help them develop the ability to take and organize notes on their own.

Handouts don't work well under the current circumstances anyway, whether we're remote or in person, so this is giving me the opportunity to try something new that's actually pretty old school.  

CE (COVID-Era): 

I'm going low-tech and keeping it simple this year.  Students need a standard spiral or composition notebook.

Since so much is going to be digital this year, I think having a paper notebook will be a nice change of pace.  

I have all German 1 classes this year, which means I have a lot of 9th graders, so I'll need to be intentional in teaching how to organize and take good notes.

On the second day of class, students will set up their notebooks

and then they'll make a graphic organizer to record their first German phrases.

Stay tuned to hear how things go with notebooks this year!

First Teacher Day

Today was originally supposed to be students' first day of school, but that was pushed back a week, and it's now it's the first of 5 teacher professional development and work days.

Successes:

• I recorded a very short video clip introducing myself for an introductory video that my school is putting together for students.  

• I participated in our school faculty meeting on Microsoft Teams and was then able to organize a separate meeting on the fly with two colleagues on Teams.

Not yet:

• After multiple tries, I cannot get my microphone to work within Microsoft Teams when trying to record a lesson and share my screen.  Grrrrrr!  Super frustrating.  It works fine when I am meeting with people and share my screen, but once I start recording, my microphone cuts out.  I may give up on Teams for recording a lesson and try Zoom.

Virtual Manipulatives

Lots of things have to be done differently this year.  For example, my beloved Pronoun Dice:

These are a great hands-on tool for practicing verb conjugations.  Students work in groups and use the dice, white boards, and dry erase markers.

But obviously, groups and shared supplies are a no-go right now.  So, I started by googling "virtual dice" and pretty quickly came upon Flippity.net.

I used the Randomizer to make a simple spinner for subjects and verbs.  (Unfortunately, you can't embed flippity tools, but you can link to them.)

Success!  Hopefully some of the flippity tools will be helpful to other teachers, too.

I leave you with this thought:

Choice Board for Enrichment

Choice boards have become popular in teaching as a way to give students choices in how they learn a new concept.  

I designed my choice board for students who finish their work quickly and are ready to go deeper (or need something concrete to do so they don't immediately reach for their cell phones).  

This board is designed for German 1 students at the beginning of the year.  I hope to switch out some of the elements as we progress, both to keep things interesting and to provide more challenging choices.

I'm very proud that I've learned how to publish my choice board on Google Slides so that I can embed it into Canvas - and this blog!  You should be able to click on any element in the board and see where it takes you.

I've put a button for the choice board at the top of my Course Resources page

and included a link in the daily agenda.

This will be the first time I've tried a Choice Board.  Since we're starting the year online, it may be hard to know how much it's used, but I hope to keep it when we return to the classroom, too.

Dusting off the Blog

I haven't blogged since the end of last school year, and I didn't really have any plans to get back in the habit, but this morning I saw this:

And I thought, maybe it is time.  No promises that I'll blog every day or that every post will be great, but as I often tell my students, something is infinitely more than nothing.  So here goes...

If an image is worth a thousand words, here's mine for my teaching life at the moment:

That's what I'm working on, anyway - accepting and living with the uncertainty of the current moment.

My school district switched last week from an in person start to the school year (with an online option) to all online learning until at least early September, due to increasing virus rates in our community.  

Since the end of last school year, I had anticipated that when we did return to in person school, there would be some students who would still need remote instruction, and I would need to be able to provide both types of instruction at more or less the same time.  So, I've been planning during the summer with that in mind, which makes the switch to everyone online less hectic. 

During the summer, I was part of a group of teachers from my school who worked (remotely, of course!) on creating a common home page for our Learning Management System, Canvas.  The goal was to reduce confusion for students and caregivers when navigating online learning.  

I had fun learning how to make buttons and customized banners, and I got more experience with Google Drawings.  I also learned just enough html to be dangerous!

Here's what my homepage now looks like:

I'm pleased with the result, and designing it helped me think through how to structure online instruction.  

This is the first 3 day week of school:

It's not the same as in person, but I think it's the best we can do under the current circumstances, and with patience and flexibility, we can make it work.