Part way through the year, I became more diligent with providing students with direct instruction on some of those foundational skills which helped many of them tremendously. For next year, our goal is to provide this type of instruction earlier in the year. To do so, we are hoping to add days to the live instruction schedule.

I am going to echo what Meaghan said in her post regarding additional time to practice other writing strategies is needed. It is difficult to add more when the Canvas lessons are a bit heavy with content. IXL, however, helped with providing students with additional practice for the types of questions they would see on the PSSAs.

I think there are some features in Canvas, like the resource page, writer's workshop, etc. that I just do not understand enough yet to use. Trainings on this would be helpful.

I like Meaghan's idea of color-coding recordings and including helpful resources right there. I'm thinking next year I will have one document with recordings and resources that they can click on for everything.

I shared resources with kids in the chat, on my announcements board, and in discussion in live lesson. When links were repeatedly not working after fixing them daily, I emailed students attachments if needed.

I agree with others on focusing on foundational skills from the start. We spent a lot of time explaining how to download/save documents and navigate Microsoft Word throughout the year. It would be good to cover the basics to set the students up for success in ELA.

I created an interactive figurative language world for my students to go to.

To make it accessible for all students (asynch/synch), I made sure to post information about how to download Minecraft Ed, how to download and use my world template in the event students could not access the world in class, and alternate assessment activities for those who had no interest or access to Minecraft.

I found it a struggle at first but then great success in holding students accountable to reading instructions and doing things themselves. For example, I uploaded PPTs for students to download and use for each assessment/portfolio. I modeled how to download and save the PPT as a personal copy about 100 times this year, but we are now in May, and I feel that all students can now do this with ease.

Another example is offering Classkick as an alternative to downloading a worksheet in Canvas--most students preferred to do their work in Classkick and upload a screenshot. Some are still not reading the instructions that if they choose to complete their work in Classkick, they must take a screenshot and upload to Canvas for credit. They reach out to me, and I am sure to be consistent in my response that they must follow instructions, but am always available to help them upload if needed.

I've found great success in this, as it makes the students read instructions more closely and makes them take initiative.

The biggest challenge was getting the students into Canvas and teaching them how to navigate that. One issue is that we are still learning it as teachers so I am hoping that we have time to learn more so we can teach them instead of learning it as we go. I also think it is important to be consistent across the board.

The students LOVED the novel study and loved being able to read all together. It was really great with both novels.

I am not sure if my students watch recordings but I have started doing videos in my Canva to walk the async students through the lessons as well as students that are behind.

Just like with the beginning of any school year, I feel like the first 2-3 weeks need to be used to teach routines which include showing students how to navigate Canvas, submit assignments, find and utilize resources, so I'm hoping the curriculum starts with some basic grammar and writing skills to practice along with a how to use Canvas tutorial before jumping into content.

I feel like the students who are not attending live lessons should still attend the first couple of weeks of live class or a study hall to become comfortable with "how to do school." I also feel like the prerequisites per module held students back. Once they were behind, they gave up. If they can at least move between modules as the live lessons continue moving through content, I think less students would give up because they could still work with the class and catch up later.

I look forward to seeing what next year brings as students and teachers are slightly more comfortable using Canvas.

Starting in February, I was overwhelmed with the number of places and resources used. I would like to streamline things next year by adding pages in modules with every resource, link, and recording that goes with a particular lesson. I think the more we can embed resources into the modules, the more students MIGHT access them, even though I had pages in the module for the novel study that few students utilized.

I think building the foundation of where to find things and how to navigate Canvas from the beginning will help students to know where resources are.

Many of my students didn't use Classkick unless we were doing an assignment in it together. They never went to look at it as a resource.