Teaching in 2020 has been a whirlwind and like most of you, I had to learn very quickly how to create digital worksheets for my music classes.
In the beginning of the Australian school year, the coronavirus forced us all into lock down. We literally had one day to change our lessons from face to face to an online version. I am not kidding, we were told on the Thursday afternoon, that we would all be working from home the next day, for an indefinite time period.
It was crazy. It was stressful. We did not know what we were doing. Most of us had only had a minimum amount of experience using online learning platforms such as Google Classroom or Microsoft Teams. We had all completed training at some stage using the platforms, but because we were not a school where every class had access to computers, then most of us didn’t worry about using the platforms. Most of our kids had very little access to the technology at home as well, so it was not a priority for most of us.
One thing was sure, we needed to learn very quickly how to create digital worksheets for our classes. We also needed to know how to make our existing resources and lessons suitable for use with our chosen learning platform. It was a real rush to make meaningful and interesting digital lessons for our kids that would engage them and most importantly keep them learning.
Below is a simple “How to” for creating digital and interactive lessons for use in Google Classroom. If you prefer, you can watch the YouTube tutorial by clicking here.
Step by Step Instructions
- Decide on what you want your students to do. This might sound simple, but, when you may not actually discuss and tell your students what do to, then you need to make things really obvious and simple
- Decide how much you wan them to do in a lesson, week, cycle or term. Plan ahead and break it down what you want them to achieve or learn. The online space is very different to face to face. I made the mistake of thinking they would be able to complete a lot more work. Keep it simple, make it short, and try not to reinvent the wheel!
- Choose your resources. What are you going to use? Do you already have something you can use? Do you need to source the worksheets? If you are looking for worksheets that can easily be adapted for distance learning, click here to check them out. Plan how you are going to create your lesson into a digital and distance lesson that is interactive for your students.
- Make sure you check the Terms of Use for the resources you are going to use. Most teacher authors on Teachers Pay Teachers are allowing teachers to use their products in distance learning lessons. Please make sure you check!
- Once you have decided what you are using, open up the pdf and choose the page you want to use.
- Take a snapshot of the page – there are lots of ways to do this. Save the image/s.
- Go to your Google Drive and open a new Google Slides presentation
- Go to File, then page set up, then choose “custom”. It is here that you change the size of the background page. Type in your dimensions. A suggested size for a landscape page is 29.5 cm x 21.5 cm, For portrait use 21.5 cm by 29.5 cm.
- To create your lesson, go to background, then choose image, find the image in your files, choose the image, it will take a moment to add it, then choose done. The background is now locked in and your students will not be able to change it.
- To insert a text box, go to the text box icon and create the box in the position you want. If there are lines for your students to write on in the background image, change the background color of the text bock to match the worksheet, this will hide the lines for writing. In the text bow type something like “type your answer here” or “Write your answer here”.
- To give your students instructions on what to do, insert a text box to the side of the slide. You can give all the instructions you want there. It is even a great place to insert links to videos you want them to watch.
- Name your document something easy and save it in a folder for the class or topic.
You now know how to create digital worksheets for your music classes! They are now ready to share with your students.
Remember, if you want to catch the video, click the link here. If you don’t want the hassle of creating digital lessons for your students, check out the resources that are ready to use in my store here.
If you want a FREE pdf worksheet lesson for your classes, click the link below to become a subscriber.
Until next time
Happy Teaching
Julia from Jooya