Building Authentic Connections With Students in Kiddom | Webinar Recap

The beginning of a new school year has always been a colorful time of year. Students get reacclimated to class schedules and workloads, and warm up their seat in a new classroom. Well, for many schools across the nation, this school year is bound to look and feel a little differently. But that doesn’t mean the warm and giddy traditions of a back to school season have to disappear.

The question at the forefront of nearly every educator’s mind right now is how to engage students without the power of a live classroom connection, five days a week. Earlier this week, Kiddom Customer Success Manager Eric Gutierrez hosted a webinar that poses an answer. Keep reading to discover how to use Kiddom technology to create classroom culture at a distance, and build authentic, inviting connections with students. For more ways to maintain the routines of the classroom virtually, check out our previous webinars below.

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• How Can Educators Deliver Equity in a Digital Environment?
• How Kiddom Schools & Districts are Preparing for the Fall (Webinar Recap)

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Using Kiddom Announcements to Build Classroom Culture

Without the right tools, connecting with students at a distance can be challenging. It was bad enough when teachers had to juggle multiple tools in order to maintain instruction; now, with distance learning, students have had to do the same.

Kiddom was designed to close the gap between disparate tools and create a seamless thread between curriculum, instruction, assessment — and now, communication. In our classroom culture webinar, Eric demonstrated three ways to connect with students in Kiddom, using the same tools that lend themselves to instruction and learning management. Check out the first method, the Classroom Announcements feature, below:

The Announcements feature can facilitate great discussions that encourage students to connect with their teachers. Need a hand getting started?

Building Classroom Culture with Engaging Curriculum

The second way to engage students at the start of the school year is through personalized, fun curricula. In Kiddom, educators have the flexibility to adapt an existing curriculum to fit the needs of their classrooms, or create their own to suit the current moment. Eric debuted 3 creative examples of curricula that engage students on a personal level: journal topics, book club activities, and virtual tours of cities around the world.

Which one of these curricula would you like to try in your classroom? Let us know in the comments!

Giving Dynamic Student Feedback in Kiddom

Using Kiddom to assign journal prompts and ‘About You’ questions is all well and good—but pretty soon it’ll be time to assign work with higher stakes. Why should the culture building stop there?

In Kiddom, it’s easy to provide rich feedback to students using our commenting tool that’s attached to every assignment. Teachers can record videos, audio, images, or text to give students a full picture of their performance and where they can improve. See it in action in this clip from the webinar:

Let’s Review: The Student View

At Kiddom, one of the most frequent questions we get is how do things look for students? You might be pleasantly surprised, or simply pleased to know that the teacher and student views are as similar as they can be — without running the risk of plagiarism! Before opening up for questions, Eric walked us through the student view of everything he just showed us: announcements, assignments, assessments, and feedback.

And there you have it! In Kiddom, building classroom culture at a distance is more than possible: it’s engaging, creative, and fun for both teachers and students.