Classroom Screen: The Best Screen for Every Classroom

Ok guys, this is cool. As soon as I saw it, I couldn’t wait to share it with you.

When I have my students work on a project, I typically use my big screen to display a QR code, set of directions, maybe a diagram for students to follow, timer, etc. As you can imagine, that’s a great deal of various windows to have up on your screen at once. Well, that is no longer the case. Laurens Koppers, a teacher in the Netherlands, saw a need for this and he created one screen that has all of these options for teachers. This is one of those great tools for teachers to use on a daily basis. There are options for a random name generator, sound levels for classroom management, QR code display, text for directions or assignment guidelines, timer, clock, and a traffic light for students to monitor their behavior.

www.classroomscreen.com

All you do is pick which widget you want up on the board for that particular working period and your students can refer back to the board for the information they need while they are working.

This is an example of the screen I was using today. I love to use timers because my classes are so short. Then, I always have the steps for our projects up on the screen so my students can refer to those if they forget a step.

 

Tips and tricks from the creator of this site.

I hope that you find this as useful as I did when I saw it a few days ago. I think it’s a great tool for teachers!

Cheers! 🎉

Match Up Partners with Emojis

If your classrooms are like mine, then you know that whenever you say “pick a partner,” kids automatically start looking around the room to make eye contact with their future partner.  Often times they want to work with the same partners time after time. I was recently talking to a friend of mine who is an AMAZING 4/5 grade teacher in San Diego, Dena Glynn (@Glynn_ed), and she mentioned that she matches kids up using emojis from an Emoji Memory Game. I thought this was a great way to get kids partnered up at random. So, instead of going out to buy the game, I decided to create my own. You can download the PDF I created (emoji-matches) which includes 42 cards.

If you want to make something like this on your own, here’s how I did it!

1. I used Keynote and changed the size of my slide to a custom size to view my slide in portrait rather than landscape. Change the size of the document to 768×1024.
2. I added shapes for the background of the emojis and made sure my emojis were brought to the front of the shape.
3. One of my favorite sites is copypastecharacter.com and there you will find many of your favorite emojis. I like using this site rather than emojis within the keyboard on the Mac for projects like this.
4. After your cards are complete, print them out and laminate them! You could also use these cards to play a fun memory game!
5. In addition to creating these fun memory cards, there are so many other uses for using symbols and emojis from this website! Here’s an older post, where I wrote about creating rebus puzzles using emojis! Try it out! 😀