In a normal school year, the weeks in June are filled with year-end traditions like sports day, field trips to the beach, award ceremonies and graduation. There is a bittersweet feel to everything as both teachers and students celebrate “lasts” and look forward to the lazy days of summer as a time to rest and recharge.
Yep, well….Covid scrambled all of that, didn’t it?! This has been the weirdest school year in probably anyone’s memory. Districts (including ours) and teachers and parents have done an incredible job to keep some traditions alive, even if they’re in a modified format. Other traditions, like the year-end field trip or class party just won’t happen this year. And then there are those year-end chores, like emptying desks or lockers; handing back textbooks and returning library books. These things still have to happen in some fashion.
Since we’ve spent so much time in the digital world lately, thinking about how we organize our digital year-end is time well-spent. So, with that in mind, here are some tips for starting to think about wrapping things up.
Google Drive
It’s great practice to encourage your students to spend time cleaning and organizing their Google Drive at the end of the year. They can start by going through their files and getting rid of anything they no longer need. What should they keep? Well, anything they’re still working on, as well as assignments that they feel are indicative of their best effort or that show progress over the course of the year. Depending on the age of your students, they might need some help with this! Everything that they plan to keep should go in a new file called “2019/2020” or “Grade __”. It might be a good idea for them to empty their Shared With Me folder, too. You can do this quickly by selecting the first file, holding down the SHIFT key and then selecting the last file. Automagically, all of the files between them also get selected and you can drag them all into the trash!
Oh yeah, in case it wasn’t clear, take some time to clean up your own Google Drive and archive your old Google Classrooms!
If you have a student who is leaving the district or if you work with students who are graduating and moving on, they should know that their Google Drives will eventually be deleted. If there is anything in there that they want to keep they should use Google Takeout or Google Transfer to move their work out of their school account. This blog includes instructions for this.
FreshGrade
At the end of the year (well, actually sometime during the summer) Fresh Grade will archive your students’ accounts. They’ll still be there for you and students and parents to look at but they will no longer be available for commenting on or adding to.
Before that happens, if you have added videos of you or someone else reading a story, those should be deleted from accounts, due to copyright issues.
In September, when classes are all set up, student FreshGrade accounts will be relinked to their new homeroom teacher.
Other Accounts
For district managed accounts like MATHIXL and DiscoveryED, students will be able to continue to access their accounts all summer long.
For accounts on recently approved sites or apps, like EPIC books, where you as a teacher have set up a classroom and student accounts, students will be able to continue to access those accounts until you delete the classroom. If you have used the site for assessment of any kind (such as the quizzes in CommonLit), please retain the classroom for one calendar year before you delete it. For information on how to delete a classroom, refer to each site individually.
And the whole time we’re doing all of this year-end stuff we can’t help but look forward to our next beginning.
What will start-up look like in the fall? Will we all be back in the classroom? It’s doubtful. How do you set classroom expectations and culture when you are not all in the classroom at the same time? How do you get to know your new students and develop those relationships and that trust that is vital to a students’ ability to learn with you? These are big questions. I have thoughts on them but no answers yet. I suspect a lot of people will be doing a lot of thinking on these questions over the summer.
thisthattuesdaystechnologytips.wordpress.com 
I appreciate your comment at the end about us thinking about these and many other concerns this summer, but wondering your thoughts about teachers collaborating on these topics and their solutions now rather than waiting until September. Also wondering about professional development opportunities for teachers who need help with the digital teaching in June? September is too late for this. I would be happy to help and run some workshops. Also discussions to create common practices amoung teachers within the district at different grade levels etc. to streamline the process for parents and students?
LikeLike