Teachers with classroom management accounts have the ability to create collections of content and share those collections with their entire class or with individual students.  Students can then access content their teacher has shared in their digital backpack of collections found on their student member home page.  You can use student digital backpacks to differentiate Instruction, share relevant content with the entire class, maintain content consistency across a grade level, keep parents informed, and keep students’ minds sharp over the summer.

In our April newsletter we shared with our members that we had launched a new feature to organize our student digital backpacks.  We also shared these eight ideas for using digital backpacks with your students:

1.  Teachers who share the same student can use the Student Title to let

students know which teacher has shared each collection. For example:

Addition from Mrs. Nelson or Mr. Arp’s Place Value.

 

2. Remember, your students are seeing these titles, so have fun with

them. Wouldn’t your students like to explore a collection called Top

Secret: Inference Detectives Only! or Fourth Grade Fractions Fun.

 

3. Create a passport for your students to get stamped throughout the

year. Students achieve a stamp by completing the activities in a given

collection. For example, in math you may have the Island of Algebra,

The State of Subtraction, and The Country of Comparing.

 

4. Be proactive about preventing summer learning loss and create

collections for each month of the summer filled with interactive activities

your students will actually complete. Create backpacks for your current

students, or coordinate with the teacher of your incoming class to use

her account to share collections with your new students.

 

5. Create backpacks to differentiate your instruction. Choose content

from the library on the same topic but at different ability levels or

choose content for different styles of learning.

 

6. Create backpacks for remediation or enrichment for students to

complete independently. This is one way you can individualize

instruction and address the needs of each student in your classroom.

 

7. Create backpacks of interactive content for students to complete at

home. This is a great way to create a school-to-home connection by

providing resources for parents to address their child’s specific needs.

 

8. Use the public collections feature to share collections between

classrooms within the same building. This ensures content in

backpacks is consistent across classrooms in the same grade level.