 Hi, I'm Alison Reichert. Today we'll be exploring a few tools you can use to connect with students through distance learning and to provide meaningful digital feedback. Before we get started, don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell to enable notifications for our channel. Also, leave us a comment or check out our related videos by clicking the pop-up cards in the upper right corner. Let's get started. The first tool I wanted to look at with you is Padlet. Padlet's a web app that can be used for several different things with students, but the focus for this session is using Padlet to connect with students. Connecting with students can be a challenge during distance learning, so setting up something like a digital photo album can help you get to know your students. These are a few different ideas of what you could post to prompt students to post pictures in a digital photo album. A welcome back to school picture of first day photo, along with their name and maybe their favorite summer activity. Something content related, like a picture of something you're studying. Maybe you want to have a dress-up day and get to see their personalities through how they dress up on your dress-up day. Or you could tie it to a holiday. Thanksgiving, something that they're thankful for. You really get to know your students that way. Or even going back to content, maybe they could take a picture of their work so far and post and share it with you and you can compare with other students their progress. What I like about using Padlet as a digital photo album is teachers have a lot of options in the settings. My favorite setting in that is that you can require approval. The moderator can approve whether the photo is shared to the Padlet or not. So here's a sample of a post that came in to approve or delete as what the teacher would see when a student posts a picture to the Padlet. So you can opt to approve that picture or to delete it. Notice the students are signed in. You can also select that option in Padlet as well. Another way to connect with students, not so much on a personal level but more with your content and your class, is by helping students stay organized by creating task cards for them. This is an example of differentiated task cards where you would be giving each group a different task card. And this lends itself well to if you were a distance learning and you wanted two different groups doing different things or if we were on a modified schedule, maybe the hybrid schedule and you were working with your shark group in person and your snake group was working digitally, they would have a task card to work on their own until they can meet with you and then you could work with the sharks face to face and vice versa. This is one sample of a task card. There's many options, different kind of tasks lists or task cards that you can create. The last task card was created with Google drawings, but this one was just created with Google docs. So it doesn't have to be super fancy. Again, this helps students stay organized by giving them a nice summary of the things that they need to complete for the day or even for the week. Again, this works nicely if you have small groups and you're meeting with one group face to face and then another group would be working on the items listed in the task card. This is also helpful when connecting with parents to try to help them keep organized as far as showing them what their son or daughter needs to complete for the week. Students tend to like these tasks lists because they can work on items on the list in any order typically and less specified with different directions. Here's another example of a task list and I like this one because it has the links hyperlink directly into the Google doc. So you could go right to the end puzzle from the organized list of activities that need to be completed. Again, this is really for convenience and to help students stay organized, which we all know sometimes that can be the biggest struggle. Here's one final task list and this is more of a weekly task list. It was created for an Algebra II honors class and it gives the students a weekly overview as far as what they need to do for the entire week. Assignments are written in blue so they can easily find those with the summary at the bottom. Students I've worked with in the past like these kind of weekly task lists so they can organize their time and manage multiple classes at the same time to figure out and prioritize when they're going to get what assignments done and when. Google has come out with a great feature in Google Classroom that helps teachers create rubrics easily and efficiently and provide meaningful feedback to students while also being able to connect with them and show them exactly where their grades are coming from. If you go to the classwork tab and go to create say an assignment, as soon as you type in a title, just say testing, you get the option to add a rubric. When you create this rubric, you can add a title and then add your description along with the points that would be received for each one. Then you can add different parts to the rubric to really expand and give some detail as far as what they would need to do to receive say five points as opposed to four points, three, and so on and so forth. Going back, notice you can reuse a rubric that you've already created and a little hack from Alice Keeler you can import from Sheets. So what you can do is create a spreadsheet such as this one with a title, description, maybe meet standards, approaches standard below or incomplete along with a description and the points they would earn for each one and import that sheet into your rubric instead of creating a new one each time. One last tool that I want to share with you regarding providing meaningful feedback to students and connecting with them is by using a web app called vocaroo. You can just go to vocaroo.com to get to this site and it's really simple to use. All you have to do to do voice recording comments or feedback or instructions or whatever you'd like to use vocaroo for is you just press the record button, allow it to use your microphone and record your comments that you'd like to give your one of your students. When you're finished, hit stop, save and share and it gives you a couple options but one of the best options is the direct link that's automatically created. You can always highlight and copy or you can just click the button next to it to copy the link and paste it wherever you like. You can paste it in an email, write on a Google Doc, in Google classroom as a comment, wherever is most appropriate for you. This also works well for students to record their voice comments and send them to you as well. Vocaroo doesn't have a time limit but we recommend keeping your comments to probably a couple minutes or less than five minutes and if you feel that you would need to share feedback or have something go over a certain amount of time you may want to split it up into chunks and do several recordings to kind of break that up some. Thanks so much for watching. Be sure to like, comment or reply to one of our other videos or share the playlist below. Subscribe to our channel and enable notifications so you don't miss out on the next episode. 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