Monday Mustang Memo: Digital Annotations and Visuals

Excellence in Education: Students Creating Visuals

Like many of you, I used an interactive notebook with my students with the left side of the notebook or even-numbered pages requiring students to process and internalize the information. One of my favorite activities were to make use of visuals such as caricatures and annotations. With digital tools like Google Drawings, Slides, Thinglink (requires parent permission), Adobe Spark or canva (have to check with John on the latter two), students have the ability to interact and take ownership for their learning in creative and different ways is easier than ever. I’ve seen several great examples of this:

Annotations and Captions: This might be a picture, a map, a graph/chart, a painting or any visual. Students can label, add text boxes, arrows, etc. to annotate the visual. Other additions might be thought or speech bubbles. The visual can be teacher or student selected.

Some other options might be to have students real quotes from history or the book.
For a math class, this might mean the problem and the solution become the visual and the annotations might be the students steps or how they thought through the problem.

Annotations and Captions 2.o: Have students add additional visuals such as emojis, bitmojis, text conversations, etc.
Annotations and Captions 2.1: Perhaps students could even insert little videos or selfies! I imagine the emojis for a math problem could be interesting!

How do you do this in your classroom? What are some tech tools that you use for this?

Need to Knows

Google Chat/Hangout: After feedback from teachers and others, LEAD has disabled Google Chat and Hangout from school computers.

Students with D’s and F’s Please remember that the family of any student with a D or F should be contacted-preferably by phone call. You’re also encouraged to reach out to school counselors and case managers (ELL/Special Ed/504) as well as discuss struggling students as part of your PLC, if applicable.

Kenneth Leatherwood will be helping out the admin team for a couple of days in October and a more often in November. Mr. Leatherwood brings vast experiences with him including serving as principal of Charlottesville High School, an elementary school principal, and as a director of human resources.

Important Dates

October 30: Combined Fall Concert (night performance)

November 2: Making Connections...be sure to sign-up soon.

November 5: Green Teacher Work Day

November 6: Election Day

Grades due November 8 at 9am

November 9: Anchor Day, Extended 1st block for Peer Survey and Computer Check

Field Trips and SOLs

October 29: 10th grade Career Expo (ALL 10th graders will miss 1st and most of 2nd)

10th graders dismiss from class at 9:05
Return at approximately 11:30. Students who missed 1st lunch, will eat and then return to class at approximately 11:50. All others will go directly to class after getting off bus.

October 31: Government Field Trip

November 1

Cross Country – Region 3C Championship Meet at Fluvanna/Pleasant Grove Park, 3:00pm (dismiss 12:15, depart 12:30)

Field Hockey – POSSIBLE at James Monroe in Region 3B Tournament Final/Consolation, 6:00pm (dismiss 2:45, depart 3:00

Stats of the Week: Federal Accountability Attendance