Building Asynchronous Lessons in Wixie
By Kerri Lambert & Samantha Wilkinson, Anne Arundel County Public Schools Office of Instructional Technology
Power outages & no water & snow days, oh my! What do all of these have in common? They are a few of the reasons behind our district’s decision to close schools. But learning doesn’t stop in these scenarios anymore.
In order to support our teachers in these situations, and to help our students make the most of an at-home learning day, we decided to create some example lessons. We wanted it to be easy for teachers and students to access the learning material with minimal frustration and with as few clicks as possible. We also knew we wanted the lesson “package” to be comprehensive and include all the essential components of a day at school: math, reading, writing, and science or social studies. In some cases, we opted for a social emotional component instead of science or social studies. Every lesson package follows the same overall structure: engagement/hook, content, brain break, more content, and a reflection. This ensures a streamlined experience and should the lessons be used three days in a row, students and teachers will know what to expect.
Choosing a platform for this was a no-brainer. Wixie! We love Wixie for so many reasons but mainly because it supports read aloud, voice typing, audio and video recording, drawing, and drag and drop. Elements can be locked for students, but teachers can still modify the pages if needed. Teacher directions can be typed or recorded for every page and activity. Additionally, student work will automatically be shared with the teacher without the students needing to take additional steps. Wixie is also incorporated in the AACPS Library Media curriculum at all grade levels, so even if students haven’t used Wixie with their classroom teacher, they will have been exposed to it in their media classes.
As always, we knew what we created needed to be aligned to standards; however, since we didn’t know when exactly the lessons would be used, we chose to center on standards that were covered in the first half of the year, or in the case of the upper grades, the concepts taught in the last half of the prior year. Each lesson was structured to include tiered options so teachers could differentiate as needed based on their class’ needs. All the teachers need to do is delete the slides in their copy that they don’t want students to complete.
When it came time to choose the specific activities included, we made sure they didn’t all require typing. Drag and drop, video/audio recording, image responses, graphing, etc all make an appearance. After all, these should be fun activities, and no student wants to spend all day typing, especially since typing can be a skill that many, especially younger students, struggle with. With that idea in mind, we also made sure to include fun brain breaks where students are up and moving at least once during the lesson package.
Wixie’s vast template library provided inspiration on so many levels. In some cases, the template was imported into our master project as is. Others required some modification based on theme or chosen text. The curriculum folder was another treasure trove of engaging activities that was already created for us. In particular, when looking for math activities, having the content organized by standards domain made finding what we needed a breeze.
Speaking of texts, we utilized a variety of resources that our district has access to including embedded YouTube videos, Discovery Education, Scholastic Literacy Pro, and our online databases. We typically included a hyperlink to these resources on the page itself as well as in the instructions box, which we set to open as the students moved through the project. It was important that whatever was chosen was easy for students to access with our Classlink single sign on. The ability to listen to the text was another driving factor when selecting our materials. As much as we’d like to think that students will have an adult or older sibling to help them during a virtual instruction day, we know that this is not reality. In fact, this idea that students could be on their own was a driving force in all the decisions we made while building the lessons.
While we wanted to make these lesson packages fun, easy, and engaging for students, we also needed to make sure that teachers would be able to effortlessly modify, assign, and review the work. This was another reason why we chose Wixie for this initiative. Assigning is easy within Wixie as well as through our LMS, Brightspace.
To pair with each lesson, we created a document which outlined each page of the Wixie project in summary, along with the Common Core and ISTE standards it met.
Once the lessons were done and posted on our website, Digital Take-Out, we spread the word! Our hope is that they represent a model, or inspiration, for teachers to create their own fabulous lessons.
