As one of the most unique and eye opening ends to a school year is coming to a close and as we head into summer there is a big question on everyone’s minds, what is going to happen come the start of the new school year? How will classes look? Will there even be classes? There is so much up in the air.

One thing you can do is to make sure you are prepared for whatever the new year will look like. Make sure you have something in the back pocket for what ever will be thrown at you. Start with what you could learn, and then what you can make to fill your toolbox to prepare you and your students for whatever comes your way. Everyone is going to be different. Prepare for all situations. I literally specialized in online learning for my masters and could not tell you the right or wrong way to do this.

So let’s break it down into a few suggestions on where to get started.

What are some things you could learn? What could you immerse yourself in to learn more about to prepare for the next year?

Google Classroom – A widely used platform that your district might already have set up! Ask your IT, they might be able to add you right away. If they don’t have Google, they might have the Microsoft equivalent. Then start exploring, start playing, and look for tutorials on YouTube to get set up.

SeeSaw – Another content delivery platform as well as portfolio tool being used by many during this unique time in education. I have seem some creative educators start building choice board in SeeSaw to share with their students.

FlipGrid – A great platform to get your students to video themselves answering questions and recording their thoughts. A great way to capture thinking and you can see their smiling faces!

Zoom and Zoom webinars – Seriously, if you don’t know how to use Zoom, you need to and get administrative approval to do at least a couple of live sessions with your students if you still are apart this fall. Webinars in Zoom is also useful if you wanted to do a webinar style lecture to record for students to watch later!

YouTube Creator Studio – If you can, start learning how to use YouTube, make videos of yourself teaching, put it in an unlisted playlist, and then you have your instruction all ready for the new year. Having videos will help those students who have technology troubles as you can provide them a link and they can replay it on any device.