Having a 'cuppa' with Brittany over Classkick....



Now that we have dipped our toe into the Classkick waters, I had a few questions for Brittany. Thankfully she is amazing and generous... So sit back, have a cuppa and read on.

1. What is the best way to organize assignments?

I have a lot of folders to help myself organize. My folders are named by the unit that I am teaching, and then I have the assignments in there. You can always move an assignment to a new place, so don't worry too much when you start making assignments. 

2. How do YOU assign kicks to your students?

My students find their classkicks through classkick.com. I usually post a slide that has a generic link to classkick.com, or I tell them to just go there. From the main site page, they click:
-Log In
-Student
-Log In (this is the step where students get confused at the beginning. They do NOT type in a class code here because the log in button will let them log in with google with their pro account)
-Continue with Google
-Next, students find the assignment name, which I have also posted on my slides.

Here are slides that I used to get students into classkick for the first time. I had already uploaded my roster from google classroom, so I used the first method. Other teachers at my school do not use google classroom, so they had students use the second method. (Make an assignment, give them that one code, but insist that they sign in with google).  

I do this method to keep my rosters nice and in working order. If I give students the class code, some of them type in their name instead of clicking "Continue with google," and every time that they do that, it adds another version of themselves to my roster. This was a little frustrating to me, because it's much easier to keep track of a roster with the 23 students that I actually have, compared to 50 versions of them all. In the beginning, students will ask, "what's the class code?" Then after the second or third day, they are pros at pro and don't ask anymore. 

3. Can student create folders to organize their work?

I just looked, and I don't see that students have the ability to make folders. However, all of their assignments will be organized by teacher, so if their science and math teachers are both using classkick, science assignments will be under that teacher, and math under the math teacher. They can "hide" the assignments from one teacher by clicking on the arrow on the left. All assignments are then listed alphabetically, so if students are struggling to find something, you can give them that hint. 

4. Do you have any best practices that you think we should know?

Asynchronous Lessons: I have been relying on classkick lately to support students to work asynchronously. I have found that I can attach videos, voice messages, pictures, and hints so that they can choose their level of scaffolding to complete the assignment. You can use the "Grades" feature under "Assign" to have it automatically tell students if they entered a correct answer. All of these features have helped my students to be more independent workers. 

Make your thinking visual (and auditory!): I have also loved using classkick to encourage students to make their thinking really clear and visual. They use colors, lines, and highlighters to really point out what they are thinking and make connections. Also, I have lately been embedding a voice recording component into assignments and assessments. It really helps me to know what students actually think and to be convinced that their work is their own if they leave me a 1-2 minute voice message about how they figured something out. We know that the practice of speaking ideas out loud is so good for learning, and it's something that kids are missing online. 

View 1 slide at a time: Under "View Work," you can set it to view just one slide at a time (click "View all Slides"). This gives you a bigger picture of what students are doing, so you can scroll through and look at the whole class at once. This is excellent for teacher spying!