Building an inclusive classroom is key to creating a positive learning environment at the start of the school year.
Every student needs to feel a sense of belonging at school, and by setting up an inclusive learning environment from the first day of class, all learners are set up to succeed.
So jump in and learn how to make your classroom more inclusive with Kami
- Kick start the school year with an activity that helps you get to know your students’ names, hobbies and how they might like to learn differently
- Remix your existing content to make it more personalised to each student and their learning styles
- Encourage student learning, voice and choice by allowing students to work with the tools they want
Inclusive teaching is a learning process for everyone – you included! But setting up an inclusive classroom environment with a few easy steps is a great place to start.
Hey, hey, hey teacher friends. It’s your girl, Jasmine Reynolds, your favorite redhead, and your favorite Kami Rep. Today, I’m going to be sharing with you three strategies to help you make your classroom more inclusive using Kami. So let’s do it.
One of my favorite favorite templates to use that we get from our Kami Library is this one right here: I Wish My Teacher Knew. It asks for your name, their favorite thing, then ask them, What do you like to do in your spare time? How I feel about school… And listen, if they like to play soccer in their spare time, guess what now you can create instruction that may even bring in something about a soccer team. And so whatever the feedback they give you, you can use that data to move forth. Again, we want our students to buy in. So when you buy into the students, they will definitely buy into you and your instruction.
Now speaking of instruction, that leads me to my next point: Remixing what you already have. How do you personalize these materials and make students feel more inclusive? You remix them using Kami’s Split and Merge. Once we’re in Split and Merge, what you’re going to do is you’re going to go to Google Drive. Once you go to your google drive all of your presentations, PDFs, things of that nature pop up, let’s just go to some of these PDFs that I have here. So I’m just going to select this. I also want to go back and get a little bit of reading in here. So let’s just say these are my tried and trues. And so right now, here’s what you do with the Split and Merge feature. You have the Math Worksheets that I added, you have a presentation here. And then we have some reading down here. If I can’t quite see it, I can expand it and say, oh, yeah, I really liked that. I want to keep that right. Oh, this is my answer key don’t want the answer key, so I can quickly delete it. And I can come here and I can then duplicate it right. Let’s just say I want to make three different interactive pieces of instruction. But I do need for my students to repeat this particular lesson. So I just repeat those. And now it’s just as simple as dragging where I need for that piece of instruction to go when you remix the instruction that you want. Guess what now all you have to do is export and listen, I can download as files or I can open it in Kami. I can even go and have this uploaded into my Google Drive. But right now I just want to open it in into Kami. So we have our main idea. And summarizing here, we have our math there, I took in that piece of my presentation that I wanted them to see. And boom, we have now remixed our tried and trues.
Let’s cut out the boring pencil and paper, let’s get into some tools that will actually give your students the ability to show you what they have learned their way. Here’s three important tools that you can use. For one. If you look on the left side, you’ll see our Draw feature when I hit the Draw feature, guess what it allows for me to do, it allows for me and your students pick a color and draw. So if you want them to underline a main idea of a paragraph, if you want to change their color on it, and have them to underline or if you want them to highlight in bulk, guess what you could do that… You can do our Box Highlighter. Boom, the last thing that I want to be able to show you that you can do for your students is you can give them the Commenting feature there for different features, what you can do is you can do a Text Commenting feature, they just feel like they want to say hey, here’s the main idea, they can just click anywhere, and then they can type it: Miss Reynolds. Here is the main idea. Now let’s just say you have a student that doesn’t like to type, they can still use their Commenting feature, click anywhere on the document, and then they can hit this microphone right here. And now they can do Voice Typing. So for our little babies who may not type well, or who may not type quickly enough, they can use this feature. So when we talk about allowing students to demonstrate their learning, having the opportunity to choose from features like this right here and use their voice and say this is the way I want to demonstrate my learning you then make your classroom that much more inclusive.
You guys have learned how to get to know your students, how to actually remix what you already have, and how to allow students to demonstrate their learning their way. I want you to take these tools, take these tips and go and try them tomorrow. And I look forward to seeing you really really soon. Bye!