Winter is Coming...Prepare your Snow Day Tool Kit Now!

Let's face it...kids LOVE Snow Days. But disruptions to the schedule can really throw off a teacher's plans, especially with looming high-stakes testing on the horizon. Instructional technology tools and strategies and digital teaching materials can help make learning happen, even in the event of untimely disruptions to the school calendar. The trick is to be prepared.

Share Digital Materials
Cloud-based digital storage via Google Drive allows you to access and share your files with anyone from virtually any digital device. Further, your school Google account offers unlimited storage. Whether it is .pdfs, video and audio content, Microsoft Office files, or Google Docs, Google Drive allows you to upload your content and share the links to your files with anyone, anywhere. Learn more about Google Drive.

Establish a Web Presence
Having a web presence to act as a "storefront" for students to access your materials is key. From this hub, you could share digital materials with your students in one location, providing them the opportunity to read instructional materials, view instructional videos, or view custom screencasts. Google Sites is one tool that can help you share digital content with your students for 24/7 access. Learn more about the "new" Google Sites.

Provide Opportunities for Interaction and Assessment
Students today are immersed in social media--Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat are but a few examples. Educators can capitalize on students' proclivity toward the sense of belonging or community that many of these social media sites provide by establishing a virtual classroom for students to interact in a supervised, positive, and instructional capacity. Google Classroom and several other social learning tools all have features that allow students to enroll in a teacher-created class to participate in discussions and online assessments, even when they aren't physically in class. Learn more about Google Classroom.

Communicate with Families
Snow days are unpredictable, which means teachers have little time or opportunity to let students know what they can do in the event of a school closing. There are several digital services, however, that allow for such communication. Students and families can opt-in to Remind, a website that allows teachers to send timely text messages as well as attachments. Learn more about Remind.

Featured Chrome Extension: Share to Classroom

Google Classroom offers teacher the opportunity to establish a digital workflow with their students as well as foster 21st-century skills like communication and collaboration. With Classroom, you can post announcements, create assignments, and ask questions.

There may be occasions, however, when you don't have time to update your Google Classroom. Perhaps you simply want to share a website on the fly during the course of a lesson. The Share to Classroom Chrome extension will allow you to do just that. View the video below to learn how to "push" websites to students in an instant, as well as how to post announcements, assignments, and questions. Further, the Share to Classroom extension allows students to share links directly to the teacher.

Differentiating Instruction with Google Classroom

The students in our classrooms come to us with varying degrees of learning readiness, personal interests, and cultural backgrounds. Consequently, teachers must contend with the challenges of managing their time, resources, and attention to help each student maximize his or her learning. Differentiated instruction is one strategy teachers can adopt in support of that goal. According to Carol Ann Tomlinson, "teachers in differentiated classrooms accept and act on the premise that they must be ready to engage students in instruction through different approaches to learning, by appealing to a range of interests, and by using varied rates of instruction along with varied degrees of complexity and differing support systems" (p. 3). Click here for an infographic: Differentiation is vs. Differentiation Is Not.

One approach teachers might consider to facilitate differentiated instruction is to leverage Google Classroom to support individual students' needs. When you post Announcements or Assignments to your Classroom Stream, you can designate whether all students or individual students are the recipients of your posts. Whether it's reaching students who miss class, remediating those that need more time to master, or enriching those who are ready, Google Classroom is a great vehicle for delivering digital content, fostering collaboration and communication, and extending learning opportunities beyond the classroom walls. Check out this brief video for a demonstration of how to differentiate your instruction via Google Classroom. 

References

Tomlinson, C. A.(1999). The differentiated classroom: Responding to the needs of
     all learners, 2nd ed. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum

     Development. Retrieved from http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?    

     p=GVRL&sw=w&u=ocmboces_ascd&v=2.1&it=aboutBook&id=GALE|9781416603924