Embrace the New Year to revive your SpacesEDU Class. By now, you’ve spent a sufficient amount of time with your students to be able to identify their learning needs and adapt your teaching practices accordingly. If you’ve implemented SpacesEDU in the Fall, it’s time for your class to elevate usage of the platform. This blog outlines four ways to kick-start the new year with a renewed sense of enthusiasm.
1. Re-engage Your Students Through Discussions and Activities
Ease the post-winter break transition by re-engaging students through an Activity or discussion prompts. Promote multimedia usage for enhanced and open sharing.
Consider the following topics in an Activity or a Post to the Class Space:
- What holidays do you celebrate?
- What did you do during the winter break?
- “Last year, I…”. Encourage students to share one new thing they tried, one improvement, and one good habit they adopted.
- “This Year, I will…”. Encourage students to share one new thing they‘d like to try, one thing they want to improve, and one bad habit they’ll try to break.
2. Re-engage Families in the Learning Journey
Extend New Year greetings to all connected family members on SpacesEDU. Communicate class priorities, learning objectives, and attach additional resources:
- Send a Message to the Family Channel.
- Create a Post in the Class Space.
3. Assign Self-Reflection on Competencies and/or Goals
The New Year allows students to reflect on their progress in mastering competencies and the goals set at the start of the school year.
You can assign your students an Activity in their Individual Space, allowing them to privately reflect on their growth:
- Ask students to describe and illustrate their progress in each competency using “I can…” statements. Have them outline areas for improvement.
- Instruct students to revisit the goals they set at the beginning of the school year. Where are they now? Have their goals evolved?
4. Tidy Up Your SpacesEDU Class
Out with the old, in with the new. Most people believe in cleaning their physical spaces before the New Year, which is a principle that can be applied to your SpacesEDU class.
- Review your Class list, families and co-teachers. Are there new students in your class? Are you missing family members? Do you need to invite more co-teachers to your class?
- Review and audit your Curriculum Tag Sets. Are your Curriculum Tag Sets up-to-date based on new documentation and assessments needs?
- Review and update your Spaces to ensure alignment with the curriculum. Do you need to update your Space descriptions and visibility settings? Are you actively populating the Reporting Space?
- Set Curriculum Goals to prioritize and track specific Curriculum Tags directly from the Feed. By doing so, the chosen tags automatically appear at the top of the list, streamlining the tagging process for your Posts and Activities. This efficient approach ensures quick and seamless application of key Curriculum Tags to relevant content.
- Load non-curricular Curriculum Tag Sets by searching for “SpacesEDU” in the search bar. This will open up a range of options, including timeframe, artifact type, areas of learning, and more.
- Enhance your planning by scheduling Activities in advance to organize assessments for the rest of the school year. Each created Activity is stored in the Activity Portal, offering the convenience of reusing them in the future.
- Establish a personalized planning hub with a private Individual Space named "My Planning Space" assigned to your own student account. This dedicated Space lets you document Post ideas aligned with the school calendar and curriculum. Ensure a confidential planning environment by enabling "Hidden Status" for both Student Access and Family Access.
Looking to enhance your understanding of SpacesEDU, join us at one of our upcoming webinars.
Learn how to view and add content to student portfolios from your SpacesEDU teacher account with our Portfolio Expert, Jordan Lewis.
Empower students to meaningfully capture, connect, and build their Portrait of a Graduate with SpacesEDU.
Learn about adding content to your Portfolios as a Student from within SpacesEDU. Follow along with our Portfolio Expert, Jordan Lewis!
Learn about building and publishing Portfolio Templates from within the SpacesEDU District Administrator account (with full permission). Follow along with our Portfolio Expert, Jordan Lewis!
To make your jobs as school leads and administrators easier, we are providing you with the following Introduction to SpacesEDU Family Toolkit to successfully launch SpacesEDU across your schools, which includes:
- Video Walkthrough
A video explaining the various components of the toolkit - SpacesEDU Family Homework
A fun way to inspire families to explore their SpacesEDU account with their student - Email Templates
Email templates to invite families to the SpacesEDU Family Info Session and collect their feedback on user experience - Google Slides for a Family Info Session
A ready-made presentation to help families understand how they can support their students and actively engage in their learning on SpacesEDU - Surveys
Questions to ask families for feedback on the info session and their SpacesEDU user experience
💡Are you looking for more? Click here to explore our additional Family Resources.
A Portfolio Template is a way for districts to customize, standardize, and organize a Portfolio that they share with teachers and students. Districts can easily create a Portfolio for a specific grade or grade range, a specific school, or the entire district. Portfolios are a great way to document and track competency-based education and district-wide initiatives like Portrait of a Graduate, student-led conferences, transitions, and more!