Revive your SpacesEDU Class for the New Year

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.