How do you plan for an unexpected SNOWcation?

Our Central and Coastal Virginia school children (and teachers) have been treated to an encore to our scheduled Winter Break. January brought us Winter Break 2.0 and a quick SNOWcation. Many of us are just getting back to our buildings to try to get our students back on a regular routine with our first full week of school in 2018! The snow days were a great time for me to reflect on how we communicate with our students. While away from school, my 5th grader and both parents received email communication from her teacher who also shared some resources via their online classroom. That’s right folks! She went sledding around the corner, came home, and put on her headset to watch a video about geometry! Then the science teacher let the class know they could turn in the project that was due, an edible cell, by taking a picture and uploading it online. You know what happened? Sure enough quite a few students uploaded pictures of their pretty cool cell projects to her online classroom!
It was….well… it was pretty painless.
I think there is value in the power to share information beyond delivering direct instruction inside the classroom. I’m not talking about a monsoon of paperwork! Packets for this and packets for that. I’m thinking more along the lines of tapping into resources our students might actually enjoy to get them the information they need. So this week’s focus will be all about just that! Each day I’ll highlight a tool that you can use to communicate with your students and teachers beyond the four walls of your classroom.

Click on an image below to go to that blog post!