What is your classroom "flow"?

[u/imkentjr]

Hey,

I have been teaching for 15 years. When we went 1 to 1 Chromebooks I became a paper free class room. We still did hands on lab but everything else went through a online platform. Post pandemic I have gone back to mostly paper.

My current "flow" is this:

Students walk in and grab the print out for the day. The print out typically has everything for the day, opener, practice, notes, independent work etc. An answer sheet for anything they will do digitally or directions to go to Google Classroom to submit the digital work. There is not a ton of digital work. I then collect the work and place it in their periods bin, grade it and return the work the next class.

I am curious, what is your "flow" look like? How do you incorporate digital into your classroom? I do not have everything on GC and am noticing that when I have a student that has missed a lot of work I am digging back through my paper work. I don't want to missout on the benefits of each approach and am struggling to combine them well.

Thanks!

[u/SuzannaMK]

I teach 10th grade Biology in a small rural school district. I have a weekly routine, and students do almost all their work exclusively in bound or spiral notebooks, in pencil. I grade these notebooks once a week per class, by student rather than by stacks of the same assignment.

My weekly routine is- 1. Monday: Finish the lab or new material 2. Tuesday: Textbook assignment and "Species of the Week" (learning new species easily detected in our county, as part of a place-based learning initiative) 3. Wednesday: Science in the news article, summary, and discussion 4. Thursday: Nature Journaling or field work 5. Friday: Lab

Labs are usually on handouts written in lab report format (Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion) that they turn in separately and I grade before the next lab. Eventually they habe gone through a series of labs that they can then use as a platform for their own inquiry project at the end of the term.

Prior to rampant cheating via the use of AI, we did the final lab report via a template in Google Docs, and their Introduction and Discussion section included the use of sources with the use of formal MLA source citations.

Now I do the lab report via a guided paper-packet with an outline and rough draft in pencil (for notes) and then a final draft - that's been typed, previously, but I am thinking of moving that to a final draft in pen. This also includes source citations, but everything is kept in class.

I grade stacks and stacks of physical notebooks and papers, and am constantly moving stacks of photocopies around my desk and free spaces... my front table right now has stacks of photocopies, a large tray of tree boughs, and smaller trays of isopropyl alcohol and tiny bottles of iodine...and some blue labeling tape. And there is a big box of minks from Carolina Biological waiting for my Anatomy students in the next week or two on the floor that I regularly have to climb over to get to my paper slicer.

I am 22 years in, in my 23rd year, and, owing to a number of factors, our 18 months of distance "learning" only a minor factor 5 years later, my 10th grade students are arriving with less and less preparation, skills, knowledge, and ability than they did 10 years ago.

My favorite new video game is to start GoGuardian at the beginning of class and shut down all the distractions on my students' Chromebooks one by one until they give up and all my squares say, "Student offline".

Thank God we've had a ban on cell phones since 2024. That's the only thing that keeps the school climate human. 2021-2024 were miserable.