A friend and colleague of mine was posting a blackout poetry fun project that she did with her daughters. They had done the traditional way of using a big ole marker and a page from a text.

That is when it hit me. We can use Whiteboard.fi or .chat and do this remote and in real time with our students. Oh what a great project and use of time. To see how students process and think. The teacher would grab a page of text, I found this on a booksite and took a screenshot of a random page.

Even if you do not find it as fascinating as I do to watch how students approach an activity like this, you can always send them a page of text or have them get their own and in their own time make the prose into poetry.

Let’s get innovative!Options when setting up choice boards:

The tic tac toe: Set up a 3 x 3 board and have students complete any 3 squares that would give them tic tac toe, this way you can mix the easier with the more time consuming, so the kids for a strategy to create their own best way to complete the assignments.

The Grand Total: Set up any shaped board with any number of boxes/choices. Then make each box worth a point value based on time it will take and/or difficulty. Then give the students a grand total number of points they need to reach or exceed by completing the tasks in the corresponding boxes. Total = 8

The Plain ole board: I have not made much of an effort to hide my feelings about this one. It is an oldie and has some appeal in its simplicity. Simply, choose one. This usually means you will have fewer items for the students to choose from and those items are very close in time they will take and/or difficulty of task.

What is next?

Next time we will dive into what we will fill these boxes with. Depending on your state’s privacy policies will determine your range of choices. I am in NY and have to be compliant with Ed Law 2D.

That’s right, now you can access any apple podcast via a web browser. This is particularly handy in a school setting where we cannot add an app on a whim. At times it takes months and a decertation of use and benefit.

Here is how to do it. It is all the in the ellipsis. (…) When you find your favorite podcast or at least one you would like to share through email, text or LMS go to the episode and look for the … (ellipsis). When you click this it gives you the option of copying the link. When you paste the link in an apple devise it might take a few times to get it to go through the web and not the app. It can be stubborn. However if you are pasting this link in somewhere other than an iOS device it will take you directly to the player and easy peasy listening enjoyment.

Schools, teachers and administrators all jumped into the fire this past spring. It seemed to bring out the best in all of us, including our students. Students were paying close attention, they were going above and beyond the call of duty to get connected, stay connected and get the job done.

Fast forward to late summer and the same does not hold true. There are a lot of us who have become numb to the whole distance learning effort. Students are tired of problem solving everything from connection problems to not being able to find their work for the day. Teachers are getting bitter when working in the cloud only offers a new level of disconnect between them and their students. Lastly, administrators are trying their best to keep everyone moving in the right direction while ensuring instructional best practices are not falling to the waste side while fires of all sizes appear across the educational horizon.

While I do not pretend to have any answers, nor do I think that I can do the jobs any better than the teachers, I do offer up an alternative that might help raise student engagement. The idea of podcasting has been around forever and has really seen a surge lately. Personally, I prefer audiobooks but the idea is the same. While students are driving or commuting in some way, provide them with a 5-15 minute lesson that they can listen to. This “podcast” doesn’t have to even be a podcast, just an audio file that students can easily access.

The process, use a podcasting or voice recording app like voice record pro, or

podcast studio and record a lesson. This is your chance to be personable, maybe show a little humor and even dangle a carrot for the students to listen to your entire ten minutes because they are going to get a bonus question for the next assessment or receive bonus points for coming to the next live meeting prepared.  These tools both record audio in a mp3 file which can be attached to an assignment, to a post or as a file, you can email or message these files in any LMS that you happen to be using.

Give the podcasts a try and you may find that the next time you ask a student to remove their earbuds, they might be listening to you. That would be a great problem to face.

If you want to get crazy up in here, you can go next level and create and distribute your own podcast using a service like Buzzsprout.com. I will be writing about my journey into podcasting very soon, in the meantime checkout “The Commute Institute” wherever you listen to podcasts.

This tool takes a PowerPoint or Google Slides

and narrates them in video form.

For Free!!!

Narakeet is not a new tool(it is a new name, it was formerly Video Puppet). Nor is it an innovation on an old tool, although it has a few new features. During this educational environment however it is almost a necessity. Narakeet will take a PowerPoint or Google Slide (with minimal modification), keynote or Open Office; just make sure your slideshow is of 20 slides or less and use the narrator notes that the creator has made. Narakeet will produce a video that is narrated in your choice of voices and languages in just a few minutes.