12 Months of Impact-The Ultimate Student Engagement Roadmap

Right back, episode 218, we are in summer vacation.

We are thrilled to be in summer vacation, but we are also thrilled to talk about 12 Months of Impact, the ultimate student engagement roadmap.

Yeah, so this actually came from, I'll just do the backstory part for this.

I was clicking around in Canva and a few weeks ago for our one of the classes that we co-teach together where the kids are primarily working in canva doing little projects and design challenges and canvas cool because they actually post these competitions all the time right where it's like I don't know, in March, everybody give us your best Spotify album cover and submit it and they pick winners.

It's like a cool thing for kids to do.

You can find those if you go in there.

But I saw one because April, apparently, is National Poetry Month.

You guys know how like every month has like a ton of different, it's the national month of this and this and this.

And there's like a bunch of them.

And they did a competition where you could choose a poem and your choice and then you had to like make a design around that poem basically like illustrate the poem and you send them into canva and they do what they do and they pick the winners right and i was like oh that's super cool i didn't bring it to our class because unfortunately we missed the deadline for it but i wanted to and then that got me thinking about how cool it would be for like a larger theme or a larger just thing to pay attention to as an educator for a way to make learning and projects specifically more fun and more timely and more impactful if they related to something that was actually happening on a national level.

So that's where all these projects came from.

We put together a list of all the different you know, heritage months, sometimes they're called, awareness months, sometimes they're called.

Now we did have to pick and choose because like, I don't know, choose any month.

There's a bunch of different options.

So sometimes we went with like the big well-known ones.

So for February, obviously I went Black History Month, but obviously because we only did one per month, we had to leave some out and we mean no shade by that.

Obviously often it was just like a random choice or whatever, we thought whatever project idea popped into our head.

So please don't take offense to our selections.

They mean nothing.

But mostly just wanted to get people thinking about this as a cool way to tie a project into one of these month-long celebrations.

I also at the beginning wanted to offer like a general tip to teachers is anytime you're in a month and if you want to do something like this first you want to search what it's the month of because we're only you know we just randomly chose one as an idea but any given month has a bunch of these so you could like choose the one that best fits your content area also The competitions around this are super cool.

We didn't actually bring any of those to today's episode, but like I shared with this Canva Illustrated Poem competition for National Poetry Month, so cool.

And I did notice that a lot of these month celebrations, they have competitions out there.

So if you don't mind having your kids compete... say to the whole class like hey guys the you know this is this is what we're gonna do for the class project but also this is a real nationwide competition so we this is due by April 12th and we all got to submit our designs I think that gets really fun it obviously makes whatever you're doing in class not just seem real it makes it actually real so I just think it could be a good way to get like buy-in from students

yeah anytime you could bring connections into the classroom i definitely think and especially if depending on what you chose there there's an avenue where you can learn about your students in that classroom.

Right back, episode 218, we are in summer vacation.

We are thrilled to be in summer vacation, but we are also thrilled to talk about 12 Months of Impact, the ultimate student engagement roadmap.

Yeah, so this actually came from, I'll just do the backstory part for this.

I was clicking around in Canva and a few weeks ago for our one of the classes that we co-teach together where the kids are primarily working in canva doing little projects and design challenges and canvas cool because they actually post these competitions all the time right where it's like I don't know, in March, everybody give us your best Spotify album cover and submit it and they pick winners.

It's like a cool thing for kids to do.

You can find those if you go in there.

But I saw one because April, apparently, is National Poetry Month.

You guys know how like every month has like a ton of different, it's the national month of this and this and this.

And there's like a bunch of them.

And they did a competition where you could choose a poem and your choice and then you had to like make a design around that poem basically like illustrate the poem and you send them into canva and they do what they do and they pick the winners right and i was like oh that's super cool i didn't bring it to our class because unfortunately we missed the deadline for it but i wanted to and then that got me thinking about how cool it would be for like a larger theme or a larger just thing to pay attention to as an educator for a way to make learning and projects specifically more fun and more timely and more impactful if they related to something that was actually happening on a national level.

So that's where all these projects came from.

We put together a list of all the different you know, heritage months, sometimes they're called, awareness months, sometimes they're called.

Now we did have to pick and choose because like, I don't know, choose any month.

There's a bunch of different options.

So sometimes we went with like the big well-known ones.

So for February, obviously I went Black History Month, but obviously because we only did one per month, we had to leave some out and we mean no shade by that.

Obviously often it was just like a random choice or whatever, we thought whatever project idea popped into our head.

So please don't take offense to our selections.

They mean nothing.

But mostly just wanted to get people thinking about this as a cool way to tie a project into one of these month-long celebrations.

I also at the beginning wanted to offer like a general tip to teachers is anytime you're in a month and if you want to do something like this first you want to search what it's the month of because we're only you know we just randomly chose one as an idea but any given month has a bunch of these so you could like choose the one that best fits your content area also The competitions around this are super cool.

We didn't actually bring any of those to today's episode, but like I shared with this Canva Illustrated Poem competition for National Poetry Month, so cool.

And I did notice that a lot of these month celebrations, they have competitions out there.

So if you don't mind having your kids compete... say to the whole class like hey guys the you know this is this is what we're gonna do for the class project but also this is a real nationwide competition so we this is due by April 12th and we all got to submit our designs I think that gets really fun it obviously makes whatever you're doing in class not just seem real it makes it actually real so I just think it could be a good way to get like buy-in from students

yeah anytime you could bring connections into the classroom i definitely think and especially if depending on what you chose there there's an avenue where you can learn about your students in that classroom.