My At Home Classroom Space!

Now that we know we are starting the school year virtually I have started to set up my at home classroom.

A few things I picked up from amazon for my home classroom space. 

AN EASEL

I have ordered the blue one, but they also have it in pink. I love that it is adjustable in height, as well as how far the bottom expands. I am able to put it in a small space. 

MONITOR

I bought an additional monitor to use in addition to my laptop and I absolutely love it. I should have done this a long time ago. It makes so many things so easy instead of going back and fourth between tabs.

NOTEPADS and PENS

If you are a list maker like me you are going to want some awesome notepads and pens. 

This is the exact notebooks I have. I actually have three of these. Sometimes you can find them at TJMax or Marshalls, but I've not been getting out much at all and ordered the last two on amazon.

My FAVORITE PENS and some fun MARKERS for taking notes.

LIGHTING

You may want to invest in a large ring light, but if not you could use a selfie ring light that is much smaller and much cheaper. Just know that if you have glasses there will often be a ring of light in the reflection on your glasses when recording or during a live session. I've gotten used to it and still prefer having the lighting bright and nice for recordings. 

Here's the large ring light that I have used before in our news room at school.

Here's the selfie ring light that is in the picture that I use to light up my face.

TIP FOR VIRTUAL NEWBIES: Sitting in a chair all day is uncomfortable. I considered ordering a seat cushion, but found that a pillow works perfect! 

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Virtual Open House Video and Bitmoji for the Classroom

I jumped on the Bitmoji craze and created my version of a virtual library to share with students. We are now starting remote on Aug. 17th and as the media specialist, I wanted to give students quick access to many ebooks and websites. 

If you need more direction on how to create a bitmoji classroom, you should just search youtube for a tutorial. So many tutorials are out there!

I also put a link to the public library for my area so they could connect with them and gain access to the public library resources as well.

One BIG TIP I have for if you would like to make a Bitmoji Classroom, would be to not limit yourself to only the images you can find when doing a web search that have a transparent background. ANY image you find can have a transparent background if you upload the image to the website remove.bg and then download the new image. I used this to get the perfect purple library cart that matches the library carts that I use in my own library. 

I also used in on the bitmoji images to remove backgrounds when I created the google slide above that shows each special teacher's bitmoji. We are going to have classes go to this slide and then click on the bitmoji to join their google meet special for the day. A fellow media specialist shared the background with me that had the windows, but I added the purple and yellow flower window boxes to match our school colors. I've also heard of school using this concept with doors instead of windows. 

One other tip would be that if you do not want to use a bitmoji, but would rather the virtual classroom show an actual picture of you, you can use the website remove.bg to remove the background around an image of yourself. To take it one step further, my husband teaches 7th grade science and he took a video of himself waving and then uploading the video to www.unscreen.com and it automatically removed the background of the video and put the video on loop. He then put this video onto his virtual classroom.

I used this same concept on my Virtual Open House video.

I used google slides to create the presentation and then added gifs of myself. I created the gifs by taking a short video of myself waving or holding cats and then uploaded the video to unscreen.com to remove the background. I then downloaded the new image from unscreen.com and was able to drop the images into the google slide. After I complete the google slide presentation I used www.loom.com to record myself talking while presenting the google slide in presentation mode. This turned my presentation into a video with audio and students/parents will not have to click for the slide to advance. Loom is free for educators it is similar to screencastify and other screen recording options. One thing I really liked about it is there is a spot to add a "Call to Action" link within the video. So, I was about to add a button where people could click that and go to a link that I mentioned while watching.