Tech Connecting With Next Year's Students

As a student, I remember getting letters in the mail in the summer from my next grade level teacher. I remember thinking "No, not yet!" but I also remember liking the fact that he or she reached out to me. With the advent of technology, it's even easier to reach out to your future students. Here are three ways to start working on your classroom culture, learn about your students, and introduce your students (and maybe even yourself) to some classroom edtech tools that you will be implementing in the school year.

• SeeSaw is a great student driven digital platform that allows students to upload content to share with you, their class, and even their families. Create a free account, share the class codes with the families, set the settings where you have to ok anything before it's posted and have the students do things like:
• Tell you how to pronounce their first and last name via a handwritten drawing of their name with voice over
• Tell you something fun they have done this summer via a photo upload
• Tell you one thing they want you to know about them via video
• Flipgrid is another way to have students use video to share something with you, think of it like the Brady Bunch opening. Check out this flipgrid I made to introduce the tool to some of my teachers this past school year https://flipgrid.com/1448e8  Perhaps you could use flipgrid this summer to:
• Introduce one of your first units and ask students to share one thing they already know about the theme (pre-test)
• Get with your grade level teachers or out of classroom teachers and introduce yourselves this way to the entire grade level
• Ask students to dress as a character of a book they have read this summer and do a quick book talk.
• Google Classroom Are you a Google Suites school? What a great way to create an "assignment" in Google Classroom and have students learn the basics of class communication and organization that is associated with all things googly!

While each of these things reach out to your future students, it also quite possibly reaches out to their parents as well. Introducing these tools to both students and parents at the same time creates an opportunity for parents to learn about the tools right off the bat! Don't require your students to participate...but if they want to, keep it up and start your relational learning of the students and families you are going to have the pleasure of working with ASAP.