Hey everyone! So it's been a hot minute since I added a new blog post to Kindergarten Diva...and although my husband and family will tell you that I'll always be a diva, I'm no longer a kindergarten one 😢 I concluded my kindergarten classroom practice last June when I made the decision to move to a resource/inclusive learning support position. Why? Well, a few factors informed my decision:
- I have a Master of Education degree in Special/Inclusive Education, and when I lived in Victoria, I worked nearly exclusively in special education. I absolutely loved it.
- the pandemic wasn't going anywhere, and I had no desire to EVER teach kindergarten online again. And, I was really concerned about how the pandemic would impact my pedagogical approaches to in-person teaching.
- there was a very small number of K students coming in, which meant that it would be a K/1 multi-age class. Since I'm only 0.50, that meant a job/class share situation--zero interest in that!
- I knew that I'd be collecting data for my PhD dissertation research for the 2020-21 school year. A resource position just seemed like a better fit with the busy-ness of data collection. And it really has been.
- data collection (I'm currently conducting a mixed-methods multiple-case study in one rural and one urban school division). More info coming soon--this definitely requires its own post.
- teaching online at Brandon University in the Faculty of Education. In January, I taught an Evaluation and Assessment course, and now I'm teaching Teacher Identity in PENT (Program for the Education of Northern Teachers) at Brandon University.
- working with my teacher best friend Leah Obach at KG Education. Although our in-person learning retreats are on hiatus, we're having lots of fun blending wellness and professional learning through different online offerings. We have our online signature course, Cultivating Connection, a podcast by the same name (just search Cultivating Connection on Spotify or Apple podcasts), a wellness challenge, and we're currently launching another session of our online book club.
- I'm the secretary of ManACE (not a super busy position of course)
- acting as the teacher professional development chair in Fort La Bosse School Division. My main activities are hosting/organizing our monthly podcast, Teach like a Bosse, designing monthly Potty PD posters for school staff bathrooms, and facilitating an online professional learning book club for FLBSD teachers. We just read Wab Kinew's book, The Reason You Walk, and it was so good!
- teaching yoga online from my home yoga studio. Online yoga has gone really well, and after a year of this, I've definitely got the technology figured out (this probably deserves its own post too). Find out what I'm offering with yoga here.
9 Tools and Strategies for Teaching and Learning Online
Waterfall questions: students type their response to a question into group chat but don't hit send until the instructor gives the signal. Questions cascade into the chat window all at once. Great for formative assessment, activating prior knowledge, and building community. 
Would you rather: students are presented with two choices (can be just for fun or related to course content). Students share their response aloud or in the chat--excellent for building community, formative assessment, and activating prior knowledge. I'd also recommend applying this activity to numeracy--there's a wonderful site called Would You Rather Math that has so many great activities ready to go and free to use! 
Socrative: free online quiz platform with multiple choice, true/false, short answer, and entrance/exit slips. This formative assessment tool is web and app-based and suitable for kids in Grade 4 and up. Find out more here. 
GooseChase: create a virtual or in-person scavenger hunt using this free app. I use it to give students an overview of websites, curricular documents, or policies. Challenges include taking pictures, answering questions, and creating videos. Teams compete against each other in real time and it's lots of fun! 
Seesaw: online learning platform that's perfect for sharing materials, submitting assignments, and creating a portfolio. Seesaw worked well for me in kindergarten and I love using it with pre-service teachers too. Listen to a podcast interview with a Seesaw ambassador here. 
Calendly: students/families can schedule meetings with you online and a video conference link is auto-generated and emailed out. It integrates with Google calendar and many other tools. This year, I used it to schedule online parent-teacher interviews for our entire school as well as for booking podcast interviews, one-on-one meetings with students to begin a new university course, and online office hours. 
Padlet: an online bulletin board that works well for discussion questions and collaborative brainstorming/sharing. It's web and app-based, although I greatly prefer the web-based interface. 
Four Corners: four different activities in four different breakout rooms--basically digital centres! Students stay with their group and collaboratively complete each activity. 
Jigsaw: using PDF annotation (Lumin), I split articles into four sections. Students begin in a "home" breakout room, choose what section they'll read, then I move them to their expert groups where they read and discuss the same section. Students return to their home breakout room to teach their group members about their section. These are some of my favourite strategies and tools that I've used in my role as an online university instructor at Brandon University. Of course there are many more--what are your go-to tools and strategies? Comment on this blog post or connect with me on social media--I'd love to hear from you!
