Back in July I had to privilege of doing a webinar for The International Dyslexia Association. Each registrant was able to submit a question. With over 600 people sign up, I have pages and pages of great questions. I know I was able to answer some, but am going to try to tackle the many that I did not get to cover. Thank you for all the great questions to help me get back to blogging and podcast!

Today’s question: Is there a program that is best to create a worksheet and students can fill in during a live lesson?

Being in the field of working with students with learning disabilities, paper accessibility has always been something of interest. There are apps such as SnapType that allows a student to take a picture of a worksheet and then create text boxes to fill in the responses on the image. Another great way to make paper accessible is with this great YouTube how to of using Drive on a mobile device to scan it and then it becomes accessible and editable as a Doc. Any extension for Google I learned a lot about over the last few months that was a favorite of many was Kami. It allows for annotation on documents or PDFs. Great if you are working in the Chrome environment. Worksheets could also be scanned and brought into Slides (Google), Keynote (Apple), or PowerPoint (Office365) and use the drawing tools. But….

That all being said, one thing I found important in live and remote teaching was being able to see all the students’ work at once with relative ease without a lot of open tabs or projects. Also in a controlled environment that they couldn’t see each other’s work. Enter a tool that I love so much, Classkick. It is a tool that much of my staff loved before, and in a post remote learning survey, was the most go to tool for all of them, even staff who had not used it before but now will use with regularity. There is so much you can do with Classkick that is similar to the tools above but has some other great functionality. It is a great tool for bringing in a scan or photo of a worksheet and so much more! It’s a blank slate to create lessons for in person and remote learning. It is the one tool that I would have the Pro version for definitively.

• Students can respond with text boxes, drawing tool or with a voice recording. (Think Universal Design)
• Students get on with a code and then enter a name.(Although Pro account can sign in with Google to create a Portfolio account). If working on more than one day with the Basic account, students need to sign in with the same name, so make sure set a standard for how they put their name with they enter the code.
• Teacher creates activities on each slide with a variety of available tools, and if go back and add more or edit, automatically added to the students’ set.
• Teacher sees all students’ work in one place, don’t have to have multiple tabs or windows open, just scroll through teacher view of Classkick
• Teacher can go directly to a specific student’s slide for support and/or feedback. Student can also “raise their hand” on a specific slide for support and/or feedback.
• Teacher cannot edit or delete student work and student cannot edit or delete what the teacher has put not the slides.
• Can make manipulatives
• Fun sticker feedback icons and also saw a teacher import Bitmoji’s for feedback fun.

What I loved seeing in my own staff was many started with Classkick to bring in PDFs for worksheets and ended up creating and reimagining activities in new ways within it that have me in awe!