Embedded Files
For students that have a weakness in executive functioning, managing tasks and expectations can be incredibly difficult. Teachers can support students by chunking directions. It is recommended that you develop a template for your announcements that is clear, chunked, in chronological order, and provides hyper-links to external sources so that students understand exactly what they need to complete and where to access it. Teachers that operate as a team, either at the middle or elementary level, are encouraged to adopt the same template so that students can experience consistency throughout their digital learning environment. As a tip, if you continue to get emails from students that aren't sure what to do, you haven't found an effective template. You will know your format is successful when you have anticipated every question and planned for that in the organization of your announcement page.
SAMPLE ANNOUNCEMENT PAGE IN CANVAS
At the beginning of each week or day (depending upon the organization of the course), it is helpful to post an Announcement in the module that will detail exactly what the student must complete. This is different than utilizing the Announcement feature in Canvas that posts announcements in the student's Homepage when they enter Canvas. It is important to place an announcement of the week or day's expectation in the same module as the learning artifacts so that the student can easily access both.
The above Announcement follows a simple format:
1. HUMOR: The teacher leads off with some sort of humorous meme, gif, or inside joke. In this announcement, the teacher provided a gif of a sleeping student that begins clapping in their sleep when the teacher begins clapping much to the delight of all of his classmates.
2. PRAISE: The teacher provides a short whole class praise. Here you can see it’s just a quick little “I’m so proud of you”, but it can be as extensive you want it to be.
3. OBJECTIVE: Then the teacher provides a sentence that explains the objective for the week.
4. DIRECTIONS: The teacher chunks and numbers the directions in the sequence they will need to complete them throughout the week.
5. HYPERLINKS: The teacher hyperlinks all of the outside resources that the student will need to access in the directions so that the student can access the external resources from the directions page.
All of these directions are provided in the individual assignment page as well, but giving students a preview of the week helps them to understand the expectations and provides clarity on the tasks they must complete.
GOOGLE CLASSROOM COURSE TEMPLATE
While there are much less options for organization in GC, if not properly utilized, students can easily get confused about what is expected and where to access it. Therefore, it is recommended that teachers develop a course template, with consideration to their students' immature and under-developed executive functioning skills, to help support the unique needs of their young students.
Here is a sample template that could be utilized:
The above sample is posted in the Stream and is clearly labeled with the day's date, instead of the name of the assignment or subject area, making it easy for the student's to determine which posting they should access. In addition, the day's announcement, directions, links, and attachments are located in the post which keeps students from having to endeavor onto a separate page to locate the class materials.
The post follows this simple format:
1) Greeting in which the teacher tries to make a personal connection with the student.
2) Directions are chunked, simply written, and numbered so that the students are not overburdened with too many words to process or have to rely on their own problem solving skills to figure out what they should complete first.
3) The external links are hyperlinked into the directions so that the students can access the links from the directions.
4) All attachments are included in the post so the student doesn't have to go to a different part of GC to find the necessary resources to complete the work.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse