Effectively Using Bitmoji Classrooms

Hey guys! I'm sure many of you have seen the craze of Bitmoji classrooms and felt a variety of things: anxiety over creating one, FOMO because they're so cute, excitement to make yours the best, etc. I wanted to share my two cents and also (at the end) share an easy to use template for what I think will get the biggest bang for your buck.

Confession: I am a minimalist. I hate clutter, maybe because I'm slightly ADD, and I can't function well with it. This is also true for your students. I also have been working hard to make sure that the things I do and create are actually useful and beneficial to my students. As cute as some of these classrooms are, if you send something out with a million hidden treasures, it may not actually support your students with their learning.

If you notice, I only have 3 links (email, Clever, and Epic). That's okay. I don't need this to be a jumping point for everything. For that I have Schoology and my Google Site, which includes easy to use buttons with the titles to follow. More on that another time, although I will say I made it all last night and don't know why I didn't take the plunge earlier. 

If you're wanting to learn how to make these, Hello Teacher Lady has a great tutorial here. Or you can google "bitmoji classroom templates" and find a million resources. I literally copied and pasted from a few I liked.

HOWEVER, this type of Bitmoji classroom is not going to be where most students find what they need, and I think it's perfectly fine to completely skip this step. Especially if it's causing you anxiety. What I'm more excited about are the information slides that I've created for students to find what they need.This set includes:

- virtual meeting expectations

- learning objectives

- weekly schedule

- assignments due

- "What Mrs. Dalton is reading"

I made this an editable template so that you can make a copy and then personalize to fit your needs.To make it more fun, I left my bitmojis along with what to search to find the same kind for you. You just need to create your own bitmoji and download the Chrome extension, then you're all set! 

Is there anything else you would like to see? I'm open to adding new slides if you realize something else that could be useful to students!

How to Determine the Readability of Any Text

I'm sure you've seen it before. A child just laboring away trying to work through a passage. Maybe they just circle answers and move on. Or maybe they completely shut down and quit. It may mean the text is just too hard. Now I know that students reading below level will have to work through text on grade level, especially for tests. But that text needs to be within reason (no more than 2 grade levels above their current grade).

So, maybe I'm way behind on this, but I just learned that you can actually check the readability of any document on Microsoft Word! That was so awesome to me because now I feel like I can look at a passage online and decide if it's appropriate for my students or not. Or if I ever decided down the road to create my own passages (not any time soon with a baby in the house), I can make sure it's appropriate. I figured surely some of you were also in the dark on this, so I decided to share a quick tutorial.

First, you have to make sure your program is already set up to find the readability of a passage. Mine was not. It's very easy, and you should only have to do it once.

Once you've done that, you can just put in any passage and test it out! It only takes a few seconds to do. I will say that I tried a list of sentences, but it didn't really work for that. This is geared toward paragraphs of information.

If you don't have Word or just want something easier, I also found a free website that runs text through FIVE different readability formulas and gives an average score: Readability-Score.com
You can either copy and paste text OR you can check a website's readability. I circled that data it gives.

I'm so excited to have these tools available and can't wait to be able to use them when choosing text to use with my students! It also will be helpful when sending home letters to parents so I will avoid being too wordy. Apparently I don't have much trouble with that since my blog came out as a fourth grade reading level. I guess I'm used to talking to fourth graders! ;-)

GIF Your Face

So today was day 4 of 7 teacher workdays for us, and we were in PD all day learning how to use Chromebooks (which I'm very sad that we have to wait another year to get our own). We were playing around with apps, and I found GYF (Gif Your Face). 

GIFs have become my new favorite toy on my phone. I just downloaded the GIF Keyboard app and have been sending all kinds of fun ones to friends when I text. This one is neat because you can create your own and even add text, which I haven't tried yet.

My friend, Jess, and I had fun trying to make one about how PD makes us feel, but someone added bunny ears and messed it up. Still, it was fun!

The app is free, and all you need is a webcam. I did have a little trouble copying the actual GIF instead of a URL when I was on the Chromebook, but it was easy when I pulled it up on the computer. Anyone have advice?

I'm thinking of using these with my fifth grade students as a way to illustrate different feelings vocabulary that they aren't familiar with. Then we can share them and have it available for future reference. I think this will make each "feeling" a little more memorable!