Snow+Days

=Snow Day Ideas=

You can make unexpected snow days more productive. Here are a few suggestions. Keep in mind that you will need to demonstrate most activities in class before asking the students to do them at home.

 * 1) ===Distance Learning. This type of assignment involves instruction and associated problems or questions. The instruction is usually a video. Your textbook may have videos. There are also zillions of videos on the Internet or maybe think about making your own. The problems or questions can be an online activity or a worksheet sent via e-mail. If it is an online activity and you want to confirm that the students did the work, then you can ask them for a screen shot of their results. If you want to be a stickler, you could ask for screen shot in front of their First Class account (see example below).===
 * 2) ===Elluminate (now called Blackboard Collaborate). This is a full blown online collaboration tool that has chat, quizzes, etc. The US used it successfully last year.===
 * 3) ===Blog. Blogs are useful for collecting open-ended responses from students. You can also post pictures and ask students explain what they see or compare/contrast. Depending on the blog too that you use, you could also ask students to critique responses from other students. Use a blog to ask a question that gauges prior knowledge about a topic or upcomming book. Blogs can also be used to brainstorm where students type top-of-mind responses about an idea. In either case, it is important to model appropriate responses.===
 * 4) ===Review Questions. Ask your students to review thier notes (or sections of the textbook) and create test questions. You could also ask students for questions where they are confused.===
 * 5) ===Scavenger Hunt. This is a useful technique to expose students to resources they may not use regularly. Use this as a form of previewing by asking students to locate quotes in chapters not yet read. Last year, my students had a supplemental textbook (Illustrated Encycloped of Mathematics). I created a fun scavenger hunt so that they would become more familiar with the book.===
 * 6) ===Online discussion. You could host an asynchronous discussion. Using Twitter or Edmodo, you could enable students to chime in on a discussion (or ask questions about an assignment). The power of these types of tools is that students who join late, can catch up by reading the earler conversations.===
 * 7) ===Textbook Preview. Ask students to skim the next chapter and create an outline simply by paying attention to the bold heading and sub-headings and picture/diagram captions.===
 * 8) ===//see me for more ideas - too many to type//===