Digital Classroom Management Made Easy!

With all of the uncertainty surrounding back to school season this year, we teachers now need to be proficient in both in person classroom management, AND virtual classroom management! We simply do not know which classroom model we will be asked to use on our first day of school this year, and even if your district has given you an idea of whether or not you’ll be back in person, we all know that it’s likely to change on a dime. We also know that however we start the year may not be how it stays for long…schools looking to begin in-person may only make it a few weeks before moving to remote learning. Everything is a little up in the air, and it’s confusing and stressful!

If you are a teacher who knows that you will need to master some level of in-person instruction (with a TON of new rules), as well as some virtual teaching sprinkled in here and there…I feel your stress, and I want to help.

Today, alongside my teaching friend Stephanie Sutherland (of The Simple Classroom), I have four ideas on how to manage your students’ behavior, work ethic, and classroom community from a distance!

1.) Plan your Expectations, and Plan to Teach Them

This is not a new idea, of course…but with all of the new coming in this year, there’s simply more to hold in our heads, so it’s more important that ever to plan what we expect our students to do! In-person teaching will look different, and distance learning will (hopefully) be a little more formal and less thrown together for many of us than it was this Spring!

Because our students are going to come into this school year extremely un-prepared for what’s expected of them, we need to leave space during our back to school time to teach them what we need them to do, how we need them to behave in certain scenarios, etc.

But, how do we know what we need them to do? We have to plan it. Think through every routine your students will need to know in your classroom, then ask yourself how this routine looks different with social distancing mandates. Jot down the steps to each routine, and decide how and when you will work these lessons into your first few weeks of school.

Sublime Little Scholars has a great Expectations Planning Checklist for both distance and blended-learning scenarios. This can help keep you organized, and may give you ideas on which expectations you will need to teach this year! It’s totally free-check it out!

2.) Digital Learning Coupons

Incentivizing students to complete assignments and participate in class when they are sitting at home is a whole new kind of teaching challenge! How can we compete with the promise of video games and endless snacks??

My friend Stephanie and I developed Digital Learning Coupons this Spring, at the request of some teachers who were having a difficult time keeping students motivated from far apart! Digital Learning Coupons are a paperless behavior management system that helps to encourage your students to complete assignments on time, show up for class, or however you’d like to use them. Completing tasks earns your students points, and points can be redeemed for group or individual coupons.

Items like virtual show and tell, a meet my family video, class pajama day, and so much more are available for your students to earn. Creating an entirely paperless management system may be the way we have to go this year, and with this resource, it’s all done for you! You can read the blog post about them in full here!

3.) Digital Stickers & Sticky Notes

Think about the ways you gave feedback to your students in person…and ask yourself how you can make those things digital?

You probably spent a decent amount of time giving feedback to students on written work, but ‘passing back’ work is going to be more like an email transaction. How will your students know that they were on the right track? How can you quickly give students praise for following directions, without having to write a paragraph in each kid’s Google Slides presentation?

Digital stickers and sticky notes! Use these digital tools to encourage students who are on-task, completing work correctly, and may need some extra encouragement! You simply download the set you’d like, select the image of the sticker or sticky note you prefer, and insert it on top of a piece of work a student has shared with you!

4.) Fun Fridays

Fun Fridays are new to my store, and they work perfectly with both in-person instruction and distance learning environments! I have a blog post that describes the idea in full here, but here’s a quick summary:

My Fun Friday sets include 10 games that can be played over a live video call or in the classroom. Each game is about 20-30 minutes in length, and they are meant to be used as a community-builder during a school year where a lot of our standard community activities have been taken away. Everyone is going to be spread apart and disconnected in more ways that one this year, and I think it’s imperative that we carve out 20-30 minutes a week to create connections, have a little fun, and build that family dynamic that we love so much in our classrooms!

So, you can choose each Friday to play one game with your students, and have that be a special reward that you’re working towards all week long! 20-30 minutes of building community and respect for each other is an investment that I think is more than worth it! I have an entire blog post about Fun Fridays-so read more about them HERE!

So, there you have it! Four tips and resources you can use to create community, manage behavior, and incentivize work completion! Happy teaching this year, everyone!