What Day is It?

 Did you ever have one of those weeks where every day kind of bleeds into the next, and by the end of the week you have a hard time remembering what you did on certain days prior? That's how I'm feeling right now. I would say that the main reason for this is that I'm sitting in an empty classroom every day. Even though the students are at home, teachers are allowed to work in their classrooms (assuming that they don't have any illnesses or have been contact-traced). We do have the option to work from home, but I felt that I would get more accomplished at school (fewer distractions :-) Now that the assignments are starting to roll in, it has definitely been helpful to have the quiet time at school to manage grading and identifying what is missing. However, I would much rather have a classroom bustling with activity (as most teachers would).

So, even though I couldn't fully remember what happened on what day, looking back at my lesson notes has helped, and it was a pretty good week (lesson-wise). In science, the students are learning about matter and how particles make up matter. They are getting into the ideas that particles within solids, liquids, and gases give them their specific qualities. The highlight of the week definitely has to be the 110-person Kahoot that we did over a Google Meet. If you aren't familiar with Kahoot, it is an online "quiz-show" format where students can answer questions that are presented on a screen for all to see. They get points for getting the answers correct (and bonuses for speed). If everything was normal, I would have the questions up on my big screen and the students would be sitting at their desks selecting their answers, waiting to see if they were correct and who was on top. However, in the time of learning virtually, we have to run it a little differently. In this case, we needed to have the students set up their Chromebooks with a split-screen format so they could see two tabs at once. Through the Google Meet tab they have open, I share my screen with the questions so that the students can see them. Then, in the other tab, they are running the Kahoot page where they can put in their answers. I'll be honest, I was worried that it was going to be a hot mess and the computers wouldn't be able to handle running everything at once. However, I was wrong. The biggest hangup of the whole thing was needing the students to be patient while their classmates get logged into the game (some of them either hadn't played before or it had been so long they couldn't quite remember the process). Sure, it wasn't perfect--the students did tell me that there seemed to be a little lag between the questions being displayed and them being able to select their answers, but hey, I'll take that. Kahoots are really engaging for the students, so it was nice that we could make it work! Our little experiment was a success! Here's to hoping that our technology keeps working for other activities as well!

Mindfulness thought of the week: Wherever you are, be there for yourself.  --Unknown