Editor’s Note: This guest blog post is from Aimee Clarke, an Instructional Technology Specialist in Virginia Beach. You can learn more from Aimee by following her on Twitter at @VBTechTeacher.
I was excited to be approached by my school counselor, Blair Sutter (@FESCounselor), this past month with the question of how we could take a digital approach to our celebrations during the Great Kindness Challenge (January 27 – 31, 2020 ).
She wanted to develop an activity that incorporated the 5C's (collaboration, citizenship, critical thinking, creativity, and communication) into her lessons that went beyond our typical use of GSuite. When I think about the 5C's of transformational learning, there is one immediate resource I ALWAYS want to go to and that all my students love - Wixie, the powerhouse instructional tool!
We also discussed the different options within Wixie to differentiate the needs or abilities of the students using the audio tools. I created a second Kind Book template with similar lettering but extended it over four pages . This provided a larger space for students who wanted to add more details but needed additional space to do so. These different templates would help us address the huge age range and abilities of all our K-5 students here at Fairfield Elementary.
Mrs. Sutter conducted her usual classroom magic, which included facilitating classroom discussion on examples of kindness students had observed or experienced. Students were excited to share their experiences verbally to build their ideas. Mrs. Sutter was able to create a safe environment before students started designing while addressing important citizenship and SEL objectives.
Students began work on individual designs or collaborated using the Team feature in Wixie. We used the Import Pages feature to combine individual project work and then shared school-wide to spread the power of kindness.
Students were engaged and responsive and loved sharing what kindness looks like, what it can be, and how we can show even more kindness in the world!
It worked so well within Wixie, we shared it with other counselors in our division using the shared District templates folder available in all our teacher and student Wixie accounts.
This amazing collaborate experienced fostered a kindness mindset throughout our building, an Instructional Technology Specialist's dream!
