Warm Ups & Exit Tickets

 

                        
 Whether you are a seasoned teacher or fresh out of college, the topic of warms and exit tickets are not new to you. Call them what you want: bell ringers, bell work, warm ups, ticket out the door, closure, these two parts of a lesson have been considered by teachers and administrators the most important parts of planning. Typically, most teachers spend time and create resources for the opening of class. It's what gets the kids thinking about the lesson and transitions them from hallway talk to our topic of the day.
   My building administrator values warm ups, but puts more focus on the lesson's closure when conducting observations. It allows the students to recap what they have learned, lets the teacher know what they understood (or need more help with), or can even preview what is to come the next day. From observations & conversations, I can see how underused closure is among teachers of all subject areas, grade levels, and experience.  It is easier to wrap up class by giving kids time for their homework or time to talk to one another, but it's not best practice to regularly end a class period that way. I have worked on expanding my closure activities over the years and presented those ideas to the staff at my school two years ago. With the tools from this week I am looking forward to expanding the closure activities in my repertoire.

   I looked at some tools this week I am excited about using in my classroom for both closure and bell ringers.

1. AudioBoom is a site where anyone can go to record their voice. It's free and you get a max of 3:00 (the time lengthens if you pay the fee). This could be used as an option for bell work when low level readers have a longer piece of text to read and comprehend. I can save these to my website and create audio files for later use. It could also be something the stronger readers record for me! There's even an app to use with Edmodo.

2. Backchannels - these are tools that conduct a secondary conversation in the classroom that can include questions, conversations, and extensions of the classroom conversation. I can use mediums like Twitter, Today's Meet, Poll Everywhere, or Socrative. These can be bell ringers to start the class as a review to the previous day's lesson or for the teacher to gather prior knowledge on a topic. Backchannels can be a closure tool with sentence stems "My favorite part of today's lesson was..." "Something I want to learn more about..." or "A topic I could use more help with is ..."

3. Infographics I have explored in previous weeks like Piktochart  or Easelly can be put up at the end of class and kids can use a backchannel to explain what they learned or ask questions to further their learning.