So I'm allowed to have one announcement on the homepage of my school site for kids to access. One. Ever. And that one announcement needs to be changed only once a week, needs to encompass the A/B synchronous/asynchronous schedule (so essentially twelve classes) and be an introductory glancey kinda thing for Latin I, II, and III/IV (as well as letting them know if they have a quiz, where they can find info, etc), since all my classes have the same landing page.
And ideally it's not supposed to be just a list.
So here's where we are for the first week:
Why yes, my bitmoji self IS much cuter than my actual self. Herb over in the corner there is a real, giant piggy bank I have in my classroom, and his name is in fact Herb. The dog is not my dog. My dog is not photogenic enough. But I did this in google slides, saved everything but the text as a picture (so kids can't move it around, but i can change the text from week to week), and it took me oh, an hour-ish. Which might be an hour too long. But!
-it's highly visual. Kids will pay more attention to that than to a list. (learned that the hard way last spring.)
-I can use the whiteboard for anything I want: let them know what's due, let them know if we have things coming up, an overview of the week, whatever.
-because it's google slides, I can live update the slide, and it'll live update on the site, because I've embedded the code. Which means I have not in fact changed the announcement more than once a week, yar.
-I can put the idioms for the week (which I always mention and use in class) up there for a no pressure refresher, and since it's a ppt presentation (google slides, actually), it'll scroll through, which means kids ALWAYS have access to those old idioms and stuff.
-I can hide easter eggs. when my Latin IV class travels to India or Africa or Ireland or wherever we're going, I can hide cultural products or practices in this slide and tell 'em to hunt for the easter egg. The ones are talking about Hydras? I can pop a little Hydra in the toy basket and tell 'em to hunt for the easter egg. In exchange for a shout out, extra credit, something at the bottom of a quiz, whatever. It creates an interactive fun element and capitalizes on something AMAZING that Mo Willems did in a video for kids he made with Yo Yo Ma, which was:
tell them to watch the credits very carefully and try to decide which of the words are people who helped make the videos and which of the words are objects you might find in your kitchen.
Kids suddenly pay attention to the announcements. Voila.