This post highlights one of our newest offerings: a bundle of interviews and wacky questions to use in classroom discussions. These interviews are a useful way to stay connected. They encourage students to talk (and more importantly, listen!) to each other, share information and little known facts, and find commonalities. Everything in the set is in Google Forms, so you can share one version with students and read all the responses in one spreadsheet.
Printable and Google Form Versions!
Our set of interviews includes a teacher-to-family survey about your student and teacher-to-student surveys around mindset and preferences in Math and ELA. There’s a family history interview, which is perfect for students wanting to connect with a remote family member! Finally, we have two Partner Interview versions (for younger and older students) that students can use to talk with each other.
Bonus! Over 50 Questions of the Day!
What is your favorite smell?
When is the last time you read a book or watched a movie that made you cry?
Would you rather visit fifty years into the future or the past?
If you were a teleporter for 24 hours, what would you do?
This set comes with a PDF that can be used now or when you return to the classroom. As a bonus, we also included TONS of wacky, weird, and thoughtful questions that can be used for online class discussions or a Question of the Day.
Here’s a sample of some of the interviews:
We hope these are helpful! As a reminder, all of our remote resources are featured on our teacher page, with more added almost daily. You can click below to purchase or see a preview.
Have fun, and let us know how it goes by leaving a comment!
In a remote classroom, forming connections with students is a challenge. Being unable to learn together physically makes it more difficult to get to know your students, or notice when one of your students may be having an off day. When we were in the classroom, it was much easier to spot when a child was feeling upset or acting different from their norm. It was also easier to intervene, ask questions, and help solve problems.
I know so many teachers who are struggling with this very issue right now. With all the energy and time put in for planning, making videos, holding class, taking attendance, making alternate plans when WiFi goes out…it’s hard to find time to check in with your students just to see how everyone is feeling. Then, when you finally do meet with your class, it’s a challenge to read their tiny faces on the screen!
Tons of Tips for Staying Connected
To help you keep forging those important connections with your students, today’s post is a roundup of strategies to help check in with your students, make sure they feel heard and appreciated, and also remind us why we decided to become teachers in the first place!
Start the Day with Connections
Superstar teacher Samantha Groess created a set of weekly check-ins on one Google Form for her high school students. (Bonus- they also help her take daily attendance!) Each day has a theme: Meaningful Monday, Technical Tuesday, Wednesday “Wonderings,” Talk About it Thursday, and Finally Friday. (She even wrote a cool little script so the spreadsheet answers are put into different day tabs…but that’s a tip for later in the alphabet.)
Do a Mental Health Check
You might also consider sending a daily survey (via Google Forms or other survey tool) specifically around how your students are feeling. For example, this teacher created a daily Mental Health Check that went viral.
End the Day with Connections
The end of the lesson is a perfect time to administer an check for understanding question or a question about how remote learning is working (try a prompt like Keep, Stop, Start).
This is also another opportunity to see how everyone is feeling. I’m stealing this example from a previous post (A is for Assessment), but Exit Tickets are a simple way to check in. A remote bonus is that in a Google Forms Exit Ticket, you get everyone’s individual answers and a class summary like magic!
Partner Venn Diagrams are great! And today, they can be done virtually in Google Slides, Drawings, or Jamboard. (I personally prefer Slides because you can lock the background image. But if your students are older, you can always teach them how to use the undo button.) Jamboard is faster and easier to use, but more on that in a few days!
Don’t forget to take part!
Kids can complete this activity with a partner, but teachers should also get in on the fun. Create a Venn Diagram to describe yourself, then share a forced copy with your students. Students can move images that you have in common to the middle, and add their own on the right side. Presto – you now know what you have in common with all your kids!
A variation on the Venn Diagram that is individual is this FREE Getting to Know You Template. Students choose one of the backgrounds and add images that represent themselves. Don’t forget to make one for yourself and provide time to showcase class creations. Another option is to have your entire class paste their slides into one presentation and share it on your LMS as a slideshow.
The chart paper and sticky note graphs we used to use at the beginning of the year are a little harder to achieve remotely. Our Getting to Know You Graphsfor K-4 can help you do this in a virtual environment.
Make Some Videos
On the subject of students learning about each other, my son’s biology teacher did a great welcome assignment using the popular program FlipGrid. He posted a welcome video and included clear directions. Then students posted videos with facts about themselves, watched other students’ videos, and were required to comment. It’s fast and easy to record a video response, too! Learn more about FlipGrid, here.
I’m sure a year ago no teacher thought they would become so comfortable with being on camera all the time. In addition to all those teaching videos you’re making, try and make a few quick ones just to check in with how your students are doing.
Give Some Love
Padlet is an visual and user-friendly tool for posting ideas, brainstorming, organizing information, and discussing. Why not create a Padlet Board just for appreciations or someone in need of a boost? Make sure to set it so that people can comment and give lots of <3. (SPOILER ALERT: There’s also a Jamboard version coming in Letter J!)
Ask Some Silly Questions
Utilize the discussion feature in Google Classroom or in your LMS to ask some silly questions too: What’s your superpower? What’s your warning label? What three books do you want on a deserted island? Would you rather always be dressed up or always wear your pajamas? You can learn a lot with these kinds of questions, and students can learn a lot about you too!
If you’re looking for more silly (and thoughtful) questions we have over 50 for you in this pack with our remote interview Google Forms.
Buddy Up
When we go swimming, hiking, or scuba diving, we should always have a buddy. Remote learning should be that way too, especially since classroom connections are more of a challenge remotely. Assign your students a classmate buddy on a rotating basis: change it up every week or every few days. Buddies are responsible for checking in on each other at least twice during the week, either informally (if you prefer) or more formally (with sentence starters or a google form) and reporting out.
You can even jump into the rotation here and there, which will let you check in with students individually throughout the year!
Get Creative
Watching my husband spend two days on his Bitmoji and teeny-tiny Bitmoji Kindergarten classroom seemed a little over the top to me at first…but these fun things help students feel like their virtual world is a little more personalized. Take a break from the teaching and make a Bitmoji Classroom or a goofy meme to share with your kids!
We hope these ideas help you make better connections with your kids in this challenging time, and we’d love to hear what you have done or plan to do to stay connected with your class!
When I was in the classroom, my favorite way to teach math was through games. This is a lot harder to do in the virtual world, especially when a lot of online games are glorified versions of flashcards and don’t require a lot of strategy or critical thinking!
One of the easiest tricks in Google Suite is one of my very favorites: the forced copy. When you send a forced copy link, it does just what the name implies: it gently (and very politely) forces your recipient to make their own copy that doesn’t end up changing anything on your original.
How did you live without knowing this? In case I haven’t sold you yet, you want to use this trick when:
You want to share a document but you want each student to have their own copy.
You want to share a template you made for students to use as a model.
You don’t want to share a document and tell students to make their own copy, because let’s face it…sometimes they don’t. And then stuff gets messy.
You don’t want to make 32 copies of the same document and have it cluttering up your Drive and never find it again because you can’t remember what you originally called it.
You want to share something with a colleague but you want to keep your own copy intact.
You want to save time.
You want to look super tech savvy and impress others.
Convinced? Okay then, here’s how to do it. This works with docs, slides, forms, jamboards, anything! Also, it’s so easy!
Step 1: Adjust Sharing Settings
First make sure the sharing settings are correct on your doc. Click the Share button in the corner and make sure your file is set to anyone with the link can view. (Note: on Google Forms you have to set it to anyone can edit.)
Click DONE.
Step 2: Change the Link
Up in the bar of your browser, you will see the very long link for your doc. See that backslash and the word edit? Delete everything that comes AFTER the backslash and instead type the word copy. The select that whole link and share it!
If you want to test it, you can do this in an incognito window. I would tell you more about that, but I need something to tell you when we get to Letter I. So stay tuned!
What They See
When someone else clicks on the link, they will be asked if they want to make a copy. They’ll click the blue button and get a file that is called “Copy of” and the name of your document. That’s it!
Remember, if you are sharing with students, they should usually rename it using a standard convention (First name in the front of the title, initials, etc.). They will also need to share that file with you; right now it is private only to them.
In remote learning, a challenge is providing opportunities for student skill development and make it engaging at the same time. Our Online Explorations are open ended and visually appealing for students. For teachers, Online Explorations deliver formative assessment tasks that support you to differentiate learning.
With so many teachers using Google Classroom to deliver and receive assignments, we asked teacher extraordinaire Samantha Groess to create some how-to help on adding a Google Document assignment in Google Classroom.
Below is a step-by-step video tutorial, and a handy help doc to go with it. Enjoy!
Remember those books? Or, did you see the Black Mirror episode? For a while now, Google Forms has had a feature that allows you to jump to a certain section based on student responses. This is helpful for so many reasons, like being able to customize the answers you need in an assessment or only asking questions on a survey depending on the response. Think of it like a virtual flow chart.
With students in the driver’s seat, this feature can be used by kids to create Choose Your Own Adventure stories. We love this activity because there is a LOT of learning and critical thinking that goes on behind the scenes when you have students storyboard their path and then go through a revision process as they test their stories on each other. It’s the writing process in action!
Let me take you on a little tour of a sample story:
Everyone starts on the same part of the story, but you need to make a choice at the end. What would you choose?
Did you drink the bubble tea? Here’s where you go next!
Or, are you more of a rule follower? This is where you go instead.
I don’t want to ruin the surprise for you, but you can take a look at the sample and see where you end up.
Ready to try your own? Here’s our handy help doc to walk you through. We hope you and your students have a lot of fun making these interactive stories!
I said this before, and I’ll say it again: In a true collaborative task, the task itself cannot be completed without the thinking and work of everyone on the team. This was hard enough in the traditional classroom, but it’s even more difficult as a distance teacher and learner. In this post, I’ll show you one activity I loved using with kids and teachers, and how it’s been adapted for the remote world.
This activity, More Brains are Better, used the old teacher standby of sticky notes and paper. (Remember those good old days?) Kids were presented with a question or problem, and individually wrote their own answers on the notes. Then they got together with their groups and each post it note was put on the paper. Students shared their notes aloud, asked questions, and worked together to write a final solution or answer in the middle that represented everyone’s best ideas.
The paper for the traditional classroom looked something like this.
Now, the Remote Version!
We’ve adapted this resource for use in the remote classroom using Google Slides. Instead of students writing their thoughts on sticky notes, they create their own individual slide. Next, they paste their slide into the shared presentation of their group, present and discuss, and then work collaboratively (online) to create their final slide.
Get Yours Free!
While collaboration is still a huge challenge in the virtual world, it doesn’t mean we still shouldn’t try and find little ways for students to continue to work together. In the coming weeks we will showcase more of these resources to share with you!
This template is a freebie, available right now at Teachers Pay Teachers.
Formative assessment is one of the most important things a teacher can utilize to collect real time learning data from students. Daily Exit Tickets: quick questions, problems, or reflections collected from students at the end of class or lesson provide a fast and easy window into student thinking. They help teachers decide who need extra support, who’s “got it,” and what to reteach in tomorrow’s lesson.
In the virtual world, formative assessment is yet another challenge for remote learners and educators. The things we used to learn by simply observing a student at work or collecting an index card isn’t so easy to do now.
Here is one more resource that can help! It’s a set of ten Tickets Out the Door (or Exit Tickets) that replace the paper we used to collect from kids at the end of a class or a lesson. There is a PDF of the paper ones for your reference, and for when you return to the traditional classroom environment. All these tickets are in Google Forms! Share the link with your students and (a bonus that couldn’t happen with paper tickets) you will have all their responses in a spreadsheet or summary to quickly figure out who got it and who didn’t.
