MIKE IN THE MIDDLE SCHOOL
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​For Busy Middle School Teachers

Tips for Managing HYFLEX CLassrooms

9/26/2020

 
The 2020 to 2021 school year has provided a boat load of challenges to teachers.  All of our classroom management tools and experiences don’t necessarily fit the Hyflex learning environments that we are working in.  With that understanding, I would like to provide some concepts that can help manage the workload, allow you to breathe and flourish in this highly stressful time. These are posted in no particular order, but will assist you in the management of your day to day teaching activities. 


Post online assignments everyday, for every student.  All students can complete online work.  This saves time and efforts making two different types of lessons (one for online and one for face to face).  

Have students submit in class work online.  Yep, skip the paperwork.  This ensures that all school work is going to the same place.  No more piles of paper to grade or excuses on turning it in.  Consider a program like Kami if you have PDF files and worksheets you would like your students to edit to turn in online. 

Upload pictures and videos to help at home students with any in class assignments that need extra work.  This is vital to your at home students.  They need a greater degree of communication for their assignment, video fills the gap and helps provide important details about expectations. Use an online editing program like Screencast-O-Matic or just grab your phone and hit record.  As an added benefit, it provides an extra set of instructions for your face to face students that makes reteaching super easy. 

Have all your work posted for the week by Sunday night. This is an important step.  It allows you to focus on the teaching portion of your class because the content is already there.  This frees brain space to make a great bell ringer (like this TED talk on hand washing versus soap).   Setting up safe lesson activities that are engaging and provide social distance.  

Automate assignments:  Some assignments require time to grade while others don’t.  Be sure you are not packing your week with manually graded assignments.  This is a guaranteed way to reach burn out in a hurry.  With the added burdens of lesson planning, communicating with online kids, maintaining all our pandemic protocols, it's OK to build in some breathing room. I like to separate days with manually graded assignments with days that use autograded activities.  Whether it's an ED Puzzle or Quizizz, these programs are enjoyable and provide rich learning opportunities for our students.

Blocks observation Lab for Science, NEW FREEBIE

9/13/2020

 
Here's a new freebie activity for science class.  Perfect for middle school or easily adapted to elementary science.  Kids look at blocks and describe the shape, color and features using both words and numbers.  This provides a great intro to quantitative and qualitative observations.  Included in this resources is an editable presentation, Google form and teaching notes.  Enjoy and best wishes!
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So true!

9/10/2020

 
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  • Blog
  • Professional Development
    • Designing Online Content for Middle School
    • HyFlex Classroom
  • Sequenced Lesson Plans
    • Earthquakes for Middle School
    • Teaching Science Process
    • Metric Measurement
    • Cells
    • Geologic Time
    • Genetics in Middle School
    • Computer Skills
    • Google Apps in Middle School Science
    • Ecology
  • My TPT Store