TakingITGlobal

Student Participation & Assessment During live sessions, to help students stay motivated I choose the sessions with hands-on activities and sit them with a peer who can help them when constructing or making the activity. I have found the most engaging sessions are hands-on materials. During a session, your role as the teacher shifts to being more of a facilitator. You are helping manage the students behind the screen to stay motivated and engaged. The best way to describe this is that it allows me a break from being the main speaker in the room and passing on the "microphone" to an expert. This also allows students to practice being respectful toward a guest - they love having a special guest! After a session, we may finish constructing the hands-on activity (e.g., beading or sewing) if we ran out of time during the live session, and then I may have a Plickers quiz to solidify the learning using multiple-choice questions. The finished art product is what I would assess as a project (summative assessment), and the Plickers quiz provides a formative assessment of what the students still have to learn in the unit of study. To further reinforce learning from a Connected North session, I have done a reflective thinking routine with students in groups. For example, after our edible water pods session, we had students reflect on how they can help the environment at the individual, community, and government levels using the Sundog reflective thinking routine. This further allowed students to deepen their thinking in how edible water pods are just one of the many solutions to a global issue such as climate change, and how they too can be part of a solution. C o n n e c t e d N o r t h i n O u r C l a s s r o o m Amy Ing - Connected North in Our Classroom 44

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