WOW: WORKING ON THE WORK Tricks, Tips, and Best Practices Doug Curtright and Shane Miller

Teaching in a virtual school is rewarding but like teaching in a classroom, it can get tedious and downright difficult sometimes. Doug and I have put together a list of tips, tricks, and best practices that we believe can make your teaching a little more efficient during the semester. We have arranged these suggestions by Discussions, Drop boxes, Quizzes, and News Items so they will be easy for you to organize. Some of these items may be new to you and some you may have heard before but we hope they will be useful. We also encourage you to share any tricks you may know that we do not share during this presentation. We encourage you to have one of your classes in front of you so you can try these tricks during the presentation.

Discussions Tip: Try to respond to as many individual responses as you can. It helps to engage students by using their name when you respond. Trick: If you find a commonly occurring issue or want to make a comment to all, use the pin feature to get your message to appear first in the discussion.

More Discussion Ideas! Tip: If you have a lot of new discussions on top of old ones, you can click “view” to see only “unread” discussions.

Still More Discussions! Trick: Check this item under the each Discussion edit option. You will get more original posts from each of the students. “Users must start a thread before they can read and reply to other threads ”

One More Discussion Tip! Something new I am doing this year is posting a "bell ringer" link to a video about the discussion topic within the discussion thread. Since I am teaching AP Government I use the links that "C-Span for educators" has already created. They are short and get to the main point. This adds a little something different to provoke more discussion.-Doug Curtright

Drop Boxes Trick: You can set the view on your drop boxes by groups. This helps organize your class and saves time when you are grading.

More Drop Boxes! Tip: Another time saver is to save the feedback for each assignment in a document for future use. To further that idea, you can also save it in my "locker", so that it is available at all times for to copy (in case you’re not at your normal computer). In addition to saving the feedback, you can add a personal touch by including the student's name at the beginning after you copy it to the feedback box. For Example: “Emma, this wonderful diagram with a lot of good details!” (This comment can be saved and easily accessed on a word document to copy and paste for another student that did the same quality work, just remember to change the name!)

Audio Feedback Tip: Audio feedback is a great way to add a personal touch to both drop boxes and news items. This tip lets the student know that you as the teacher are fully engaged in the class!

News Items Trick: Using conditional releases on news items. You can do things ahead of time and time them just right for the student who needs to see them. It has to be easier on the students. Before I started using them I would list everything due for each group for a benchmark in one news item or I would constantly be moving some news items up so that later schedules could see them.

More News Items! Tip: Adding colored background to news announcements by using the table tool. It makes each announcement distinguishable, eye catching, and can be a great organizational tool if you have a lot of news announcements.

Even More News Items! Trick: You can copy embed codes for news items that you know you will use again or that you will use for another course. You can copy these codes into a word document and label the topic for future use.

Quizzes When you are grading quizzes, you can rank them by date submitted (rather than student name) by clicking on the Attempts tab

Some Great Time Saving Tips! 1. Create a spreadsheet to track replies to Welcome and welcome calls. (In addition to logging in CL.) You can at a glance see who needs a second contact the day before class begins. 2. Create a feedback document for common errors or accolades for dropbox items for each module. 3. Use Dial My Calls and/or Remind 101 to send out due date reminders. If the students missed logging into their GAVS course, they probably missed checking Create a word document with great clip art drop box messages. Keep a clip art folder with the animation factory items you use for holidays and other occasions. 5. Create a folder for monthly e portfolio items. Drop in your exemplars as you are grading, attending professional learning, creating differentiation items, and analyzing data. Uploading to e portfolio is a breeze. 6. Check the Teacher Forum when you can’t find something. …still can’t find it, ask a colleague, your mentor, or your DC. Don’t spend hours looking.

Do you have any tips or tricks that you would like to share at this time?