Lesson Ideas

The lesson ideas will be different depending on the grade level and the subject area. Our advice, as the district technology integrators, is to start by sticking with tools and resources that your students already have some experience using because it will be challenging for them to be working remotely.

As the students adjust to the remote learning environment, it's perfectly acceptable to introduce new resources and technologies to extend your lessons. Be sure to provide lots of video instruction support. Screencastify is an excellent tool to use to provide that video support.

Hyperdocs Lesson Format

One tool that will help support your lesson is the "hyperdoc" style of lesson planning and scaffolding. Link to a series of templates to guide your work. This allows students to have access to all of the work in one document and move forward at their own pace. The template prompts you to follow a sound pedagogy for structuring your lesson.

Hyperdocs don't have to be just a Google Doc. I have seen some great ones using Google Slides, Google Drawings and Google Sites.

Game Board Style Format

Here is a gameboard template that Hilary and I created that can be utlized for a lesson plan as well. Feel free to use this by making a copy. Also, feel free to tweak the squares to make it your own.

Here is the original gameboard template created by the teachers who created the idea of "hyperdocs" several years ago. In their gameboard, they don't put an entire lesson plan. They simply offer a series of activities for students. Notice the sqares use verbs to help you select a variety of resouces for students to cover several learning styles.

One Google Slide Deck Per Class

Here is an idea to try that fits in with teaching collaboration. What better time to try it than now with the potential for classes being moved to a remote learning environment? Create one Google Slide deck and put it in Google Classroom. Give everyone editing rights. Yes, you heard correctly, everyone gets editing rights.

Ask each student to create a slide and put their name in the speaker's note area. Then have the student get to work using the Explore Tool to find one copyright image to add to the slide and write a sentence or two about the assigned topic.

Ask students to comment on the slide above theirs and the one below their slide. You will have to teach students what types of comments are helpful and appropriate.

Yes, you will also need to discuss being a responsible digital citizen and yes, kids will delete or pollute a slide either accidently or intentionally.

Ongoing practice with this access and your firm guidance will change this over time. This allows one shared space for working on something. It's messy at first but turns out to be an excellent learning opportunity.

One Google Spreadsheet Per Class

Not a fan of using Google Slides but you love spreadsheets, well you can use the same concept outlined above by giving all students in a class editing rights to a spreadsheet. Have a series of tabs with a prompt on each tab. Have students grab a cell on the tab and insert their response. Teach students how to wrap text and how to protect their response. Ask students to comment on the work of other students. This creates a collaborative area for students to work and you have only one sheet for your entire class to preview instead of opening 25 individual spreadsheets.