As the current school year draws to a close, you might be organizing and looking ahead to next year. Gathering user-friendly tech tools to facilitate work with students and colleagues can help build excitement for the coming year!
If you plan to be leading a session with colleagues or facilitating a meeting, Classkick is a platform to consider as a way to receive feedback and input from your peers. It is also a great way to collaborate quickly and easily with your team in smaller meetings or planning sessions. Try Classkick as a PD tool, and then see how seamlessly it might fit into your work with students!
As has been described before, students or participants simply enter the given code (generated by the teacher) to join a Classkick assignment. As a teacher, you would create the slides ahead of time, and prepare the code to share with others. No other participants need to create an account – they just need a device! Furthermore, contributions are saved automatically, which means there is no need to download or click buttons.
Within the teacher view (shown below), you can easily toggle between student submissions, looking at individual slides, or you can see a whole-class view. The teacher view allows you to view the entire assignment, or one slide at a time.
You can integrate reflection time and get feedback easily. For example, recently during a meeting, our team did a brief individual reading and responded to questions, ranking our preferences of what we’d like to explore more deeply. The team leader could then pull up the teacher dashboard and sort our selections right then and there to make decisions quickly and efficiently.
Other Ideas:
- At the beginning of the year, use Classkick as a get-to-know-you tool during a staff meeting!
- During a PD, have teachers solve their own math problem and compare strategies
- Individually unpack and explain an ISTE standard in small groups, and then collectively share
- Ask for feedback about a new policy or resource
- Provide suggestions or ask questions during a book study
- Analyze a sample of student writing and generate sample “compliments” and “tips”
Remember that participants can respond to slides with the drawing tool, by typing, and with voice recording – so get creative!
BITS AND PIECES 