Unpacking Education & Tech Talk For Teachers
Birthday Celebrations
In today’s episode, we'll explore ways that you can leverage technology for birthday celebrations in the classroom.
#301 — Birthday Celebrations
10 min
AVID Open Access
Speaker 1 0:00
Paul, welcome to Tech Talk for teachers. I'm your host, Paul Beckermann.
Transition Music 0:15
Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. What's in the toolkit? What is in the toolkit? So what's in the toolkit? Check it out.
Paul Beckermann 0:16
The topic of today's episode is birthday celebrations. You know, birthday celebrations are important not because someone's turning a year older, but because celebrating a person's birthday recognizes them. It's a way to say, "I see you. You're important to me, and I want to celebrate you." When it seems like our students are struggling with mental health more than ever, birthday celebrations can be a great way to lift them up and bring a spark of joy into our school day and into our classrooms. You might not normally think about technology when you think about classroom birthday celebrations, but maybe you should. Let's take a look at a few ideas.
Transition Music 2:37
Integration inspiration. Integration ideas.
Paul Beckermann 1:01
First, let's explore decorations and cards. What's a birthday without decorations and cards? Right? You want the space to feel festive and you want the birthday person to receive a special message on their special day. Two free products that are perfect for meeting this need are Canva and Adobe Express. Both of these online tools offer a really large palette of templates that you can customize, and just as importantly, they offer free access for students and educators in K-12 schools. You can use these tools to design banners, posters, cards, and so much more. Whatever you create can be printed out or shared virtually. While you could choose to be doing the designing, it can be really fun to have students help with this. You could break the class up into groups and then have each group design something for the birthday celebration. Maybe one group creates a happy birthday banner. Another could create a birthday card, and a third could create a bulletin board display about the student. Not only does this make the event more student-centered, but it gets your students creating, collaborating, and actively celebrating that student's birthday. You might even designate a specified portion of your class bulletin board as the birthday spotlight or birthday corner. In this way, a student is always being recognized and celebrated in your classroom. You could even have a little birthday corner in your LMS, if you have one. When you get to the spring of the year, you may want to consider a larger section for upcoming summer birthdays. You certainly don't want to forget those students and have them feel left out.
Next, let's look at communication. Technology can also be used to communicate birthday wishes. Again, this can come from the teacher or the student, and preferably both. As a teacher, you can send messages home. Email is a reliable option, and you can probably find home email addresses in your student information system. If you use a classroom management tool like Seesaw or SchoolG or one of the others out there, you can usually send messages home through those platforms as well. Your student information system probably also has a messaging feature built into it. If these platforms offer a delayed send option, you can get all the messages written up in one day and scheduled to be sent off on that student's birthday. This is nice in a lot of ways because then you can do it when you have time and not worry about missing somebody. I always say "Delay send is your friend." It's really nice to send the message to the parent and the student. In this way, the student will not only get the message, but also be celebrated in front of their parents. This can amplify the well wishes and extend the celebration to the home. Students can send messages as well. You could have them design cards in Canva or Adobe Express, print them, and then physically give them to their classmate. Or you could have them send virtual messages. You could have them do this in a class discussion board. Or you could use a collaborative tool like Padlet or Figjam to have students share a positive note to their classmate. The nice thing about these virtual platforms is that students can post content in multiple modalities. They can post text, but most of them also allow for images, video, or audio messages, as well. This gives students voice and choice and allows them to make the message feel more personal. When having students send messages, you might want to screen them before passing them along to the birthday student, just to make sure they're all positive and uplifting. Of course, setting these expectations before the students post goes a long way as well. You'll want your students to build up and celebrate the birthday student with positive messages that focus on their best qualities and their best assets. This can be a great esteem builder for students and a great way to celebrate them.
Third, let's look at some class activities. What's a birthday celebration without some fun class activities, right? This is another place that technology can be really helpful. Here are some ideas you might want to consider. First, birthday trivia. This is one of my favorites. You can use online quiz game software to create a trivia quiz about your birthday student. To give you content for this, you might want to either interview the student and that gives them some nice one-on-one time with you. Or if you don't have time for that, have them fill out a quick Google Form. This is a great way to tell the student that you want to know about them, and it also gives you the content that you'll need to create the quiz activity. You can put this content into one of many of the quiz generators that are out there. Kahoot and Quizlet are two of my favorites. I especially like Quizlet Live because it gets kids collaboratively answering the trivia questions about the birthday student. I've never seen a Quizlet Live experience that wasn't filled with intense collaboration and heartfelt laughter. Kids love it, and so do adults, for that matter. Another option is to create a Jeopardy board with categories of information about the student. This can also be a nice option to celebrate a month's worth of birthdays with each column or category being the name of a different student. That way, there are five or six questions about each of the birthday students, and you can celebrate collectively, maybe once a month. There are a lot of free Jeopardy board templates available online. A second idea is using technology for student creations. In my mind, having students use technology to create something original is one of the most powerful classroom experiences we can provide. It engages them at the highest level and is an authentic way to get them applying classroom content, student creations can also be built into birthday celebrations. You can have students do this independently or as groups. I tend to prefer group work for this, because it can be more engaging, it's fun, and it feels a bit more like a party. And birthdays should feel like a party. To put this into effect, you want to choose an outcome or project goal as well as a digital tool to be used. Sometimes you may want to pick the specific message and tool, but when possible, it's more empowering to give students voice and choice on this, within parameters, of course. One fun idea is to have students create a birthday book. This could be a collection of pages celebrating the assets of a featured student, or it might be a fictional story featuring the student. Book Creator is a great tool for this, since it allows students to add video, text, images, and audio. Of course, you'll want to again, set the expectations for a positive and uplifting message. These products should build the student up. In addition to Book Creator, you could have students use other multimedia tools like Canva, Adobe Express, maybe video editing software, Seesaw has a great drawings feature, or even a collaborative slideshow to design and build birthday messages. If you have students create a more complex product like one of these, you might want to celebrate a number of birthdays at once and divide the birthday students among groups. This can save you some time. You might decide to do this at the end of each quarter or trimester to keep it more manageable and more novel.
Third, consider student choice fun time. Sometimes the birthday activities will be simply for fun. You could give the birthday student the opportunity to choose the activity that they want for their birthday. You could create a choice board or make a set of birthday coupons for the student to pick from. These could, again, be created with Canva or Adobe Express. Options could include both online and offline options, as well as individual and full class rewards. Some examples might be choosing a Go Noodle Brain Break birthday dance video, or playing an online digital game, maybe experiencing a virtual field trip of their choice, or perhaps a 360-degree video. There's lots of those on YouTube now. It could mean creating a playlist of favorite online books using Epic or another book-hosting platform, and then the students could all choose from that birthday student's book list. Maybe students choose to engage in an escape room or a breakout challenge. Flippity has a really cool breakout challenge option that you can quickly make online and share with students. Or maybe the birthday child gets to be line leader for a day, eat lunch with a teacher, or sit by a friend. They can be simple things like that too. Not everything needs to be a digital experience. Sometimes the digital tool simply helps you create the choice board or decor to augment that celebration. As I mentioned earlier, birthday celebrations might not be the first classroom experience that you think about when you consider tech integration, but birthday celebrations are important, and tech can help make these days special and memorable and easier to implement.
And while we're on the topic of birthdays, happy birthday to TechTalk for Teachers! We just surpassed Episode 300! We're so grateful to all of you for listening and helping us get to this milestone episode, and even more importantly, we're grateful for all you do for your students. You really do make a difference in their lives. So thank you.
To learn more about today's topic and explore other free resources, be sure to visit AvidOpenAccess.org. And, of course, join Rena, Winston, and me every Wednesday for our full-length podcast, Unpacking Education, where we're joined by exceptional guests and explore education topics that are important to you. Thanks for listening. Take care, and thanks for all you do. You do make a difference.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai