The task of deciphering the scribbles you made on last years scheme of learning and updating it, to provide you with a starting pointing for this years teaching is complete. Time to turn your attention to the first week.
During this first week you will be setting out your stall including high expectations, around classroom conduct and professionalism, establishing routines which going forward will help getting your learners settled into learning at the start of a lesson more quickly.
If you are fortunate to have a base room the use of wall displays can be a good way to set the tone for the year as well help to inspire the student by highlighting future career opportunities.This can be a great chance to get the students involved and has the added benefit of giving them a sense of ownership for the space.
There are a number or easy to use tools for creating posters, such as Canva, Piktochart and Google drawing, I particularly like Google drawing as it allows for real time collaboration and automatically saves changes. Here is my quick guide on using it.
With ever reducing contact hours, it is even more important that students can continue learning conversations beyond the walls of the classroom, along with connecting and collaborating with you and their peers.
Most courses will make use of a variety of social media channels in addition to the institutions VLE, so it is important that students gain access as quickly as a possible. One way to do this is via a poster with a QR code, a easy to use site for creating this is Poster Oven, here is my walk through guide to using it.
With more and more students having mobile phones setting out how you want them to use in connection with the lesson and learning is important, there are a couple of things I have found useful.
Create a phone place mat for each student with re-directional QR codes linking to resources that will be used in class and a link to your organisations wifi sign in page. The easier is is for them to access the wifi the more likely you they and you are going to want to use it.