Providing Feedback for Digital Writing
Adrianne Shetenhelm
Room 301 (Melissa Dubois's room)

When it’s time to grade written projects, teachers realize how important it is to provide effective feedback for students, but we find ourselves writing the same comments over and over again.  If your students are submitting their work electronically through Google Classroom or Google Docs, there is an easier way to provide specific, detailed feedback with the ease of a couple of keystrokes. In this session, we will explore how to create custom keyboard shortcuts in Google Docs so you can create a bank of your most commonly used comments, and tie those to a short code comprised of a few letters. We will also review how to monitor students’ writing progress through the revision history, including how to check the comment history to determine if they made the teacher-recommended changes.

An after-school session of this workshop will also be held in the WHS Library on Monday, December 12th.

Using Infographics to Report Research Findings
Vanessa Michaud
Room 314 (Kim Bartholomew's room)

Since the recent creation of a research design process at Windham High School, an increasing number of students are learning how to conduct research. If you would like to utilize the research process to help your students learn how to move beyond basic google searches, but a written paper isn’t your intended goal, then infographics might be right for your classes! Infographics require a big idea or purpose, facts and evidence, specific details, numbers (if applicable), and creative use of color, images, and shapes. As with all research, a list of resources is included.

An after-school session of this workshop will also be held in the WHS Library on Thursday, December 15th.

Jeopardy Reviews Using Flippity and Google Sheets
Allison Reynolds
Room 305 (Jeff Bell's room)

Have you ever tried to create a Jeopardy review game through Powerpoint? It involves way too many links, and it doesn't keep track of the students' scores for you! Now, Flippity has combined with Google Sheets to create a quick, easy, and intuitive way to create an interactive Jeopardy game! The best part is, it is a website link that you can share with your students to help them study! With tools like adding photos, reloadable links, and real-time editing, reviewing materials has never been easier and fun!

An after-school session of this workshop will also be held in the WHS Library on Wednesday, December 14th.

Breakout EDU and Digital Breakouts 

Jen Shapiro
Room 302 (Paula Pock's room)

Breakout EDU creates ultra-engaging learning games (Breakouts) that teach teamwork, problem solving, critical thinking, and troubleshooting by presenting participants with challenges that ignite their natural drive to problem-solve. Breakouts can be used to teach core academic subjects and have embedded standards that apply problem solving strategies within a real world OR collaborative context.
In this session, you will be given 30 minutes to solve the content-specific clues and “break out” of the box. Then, we will brainstorm ideas for a Breakout lesson to use in your own classroom!

Digital Breakouts will be briefly introduced in this session. A full workshop will be held in the WHS Library after school on Thursday, December 8th. 

Pear Deck
Natalie Skovran
Room 313 (Chris Aube's room)

Have you heard of NearPod? Pear Deck is its sister program, and RSU14 just received a grades 6-12 subscription for teachers! Pear Deck is an interactive presentation tool with built-in formative assessments that provide engaging discussion opportunities. With Pear Deck, you can move students beyond passive note-taking to manipulating dots on maps or graphs, drawing the solution to a problem, or writing their answer to a question. It’s fun and engaging for students and provides valuable lesson feedback about students’ understanding for teachers. This session will provide a quick intro to the program and then get you creating a “deck” you can use in your classes!

Do More with Google Forms!
Mike Levine
Choir Room 

Google Forms is widely known as a survey creator, but teachers are using it for much more in their classrooms. It’s a great way to introduce discussion topics, conduct exit tickets, and give online assessments. You can set a Google Forms quiz to grade the assessment for you OR to only accept correct answers. Your different classes’ answers can appear as separate tabs within one spreadsheet, and Google has built-in data analysis tools so you can easily sort through the students’ answers. You can limit the number of student responses, choose when the form can and cannot receive responses, and decide if the students should get immediate feedback or receive it later through email. There is also a new feature that allows students to submit files through the form. Google Forms has many useful features, and you will learn all of them in this session!

Building Digital Text Sets
Amy Denecker
Room 322 (Jim Clark's room)

​With the demand for informational texts to be integrated into curriculum across content areas, now is a great time to explore online resources.  Discover how they can be used to create digital text sets for your classroom!  In this workshop, we will survey the wealth of resources available online.  We will also consider methods for sharing resources with students and the tools available to help differentiate for a variety of reading levels and learning styles.