The school year is beginning and many of us are waiting to see how it will look with Covid 19 safety requirements added. SLPs and Teachers just can’t continue to use teaching methods of the past. Requirements of maintaining distance, students not meeting in groups, switching teachers or rooms, and not sharing materials make it impossible. Many of us feel like Humpty Dumpty sitting on the wall. If we can’t keep ourselves balanced meeting all the requirements, we will end up in a thousand pieces and directions.
However, there is some good news. Teaching methods are starting to catch up with the circumstances. Digital learning can help differentiate instruction and fill the gaps in the classroom setting, as well as with distant learning. A real juggling act if you have to do both. Last Spring, many of us scrambled to learn new technology and create our own lessons that would work for long distance learning. This was a huge learning curve. This year there are alternatives to creating your own lessons from scratch.
Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT) has stepped in and made some significant changes to their platform. There are now new digital options. On TPT, you now have an option to place a digital overlay on a PDF download for use with Google Classroom. With this digital overlay a PDF download can be revised. Options include; adding text, hiding information such as answers, adding answer boxes for students to write or print in, highlighting, and adding teacher directions. The original product remains intact. The lessons can be assigned to multiple students and assigned through Google Classroom. You can keep your own file of the revised lessons you make. Talk about a time saver!
If you have bought products from TPT in the past, you need to find out if the past product can now be used in this way. Products from a previous purchase, will continue to be free downloads and now you will be able to use them with the overlay. Teacher authors have been working hard to update their products to make them user friendly. You owe it to yourself to check it out.
I went through my products to see which ones could be revised. A lot of mine are task cards with answers. I think a lot of them are used by SLPs and some teachers to do specific remediation and teach concepts in short segments. I decided making fill- able answer blocks on top of the current answers would be the most useful. I made this available on a number of the products so you won’t need to do that revision yourself. A few of the products that I did this with are listed below. If you find different ways to revise them , I would like to know. I can adjust the template of my products in some cases. you can contact me by writing in the comment cloud above each post. I monitor these for spam so they don’t always get published on the site. If you don’t want it visible, just let me know.
Answers in bar codes
Here is wishing everyone the best possible start to their school year.