Spaces: #21for21 Great Ideas from Educators

If you haven’t heard about Spaces EDU, now is definitely the time to check it out. Besides offering a lot for educators and students when it comes to creating digital portfolios and building the essential skills to be prepared for now and in the future, they’re offering a lot more for educators this month!

Check out the 21 Educators, 21 interviews and the 21 days of giveaways to teachers. The #21for21 is a podcast series in which each teacher shares their experiences, what has worked for them in the classroom and what they believe we need to provide for our students in order to be successful in our 21st century world. Make sure you subscribe to the 21for21 newsletter to be entered into the giveaways, and check out each of the 21 videos available.

Each educator offers some helpful tips about preparing students for a skills-based world through real-world experiences, promoting communication and collaboration skills, and more. Take some time to listen to each idea and borrow it for your classroom!

Listen to each and click “Tweet to vote” for your favorite “Borrow and Share idea. Check out the great prizes still to be given away. The top five educators with the most votes will win cash prizes for their classrooms.

Preparing for the Future with Spaces

It is important that educators find ways to better understand students and their interests in learning. Having the right tools or methods in place, can help with not only supporting students on their learning journey, it helps with building those vital teacher-student relationships. A key part of this is that it helps to focus on the social-emotional learning (SEL) skills as students build their self-awareness and also self-management skills, when they look at the work that they’ve done and set new goals for their continued learning journey.

portfolios enable us to be able to give authentic, meaningful feedback to students and develop a better understanding of each student’s strengths and needs. These “spaces” also help to build relationships as we get to know our students and their learning needs and strengths more.

Spaces provides a great choice for creating digital portfolios and more. Through digital portfolios, students can choose and compile artifacts of the work that they have done throughout the year or during a PBL experience. By including samples of projects or even reflections on career explorations or participation in community activities that they engaged in during their high school career, educators and future employers will be able to see student growth over time. Portfolios are a great way for students to show their learning journey. Creating portfolios in a digital space gives students the opportunity to self-assess, track their growth over time as they build their narrative. With the use of digital portfolios, we help students focus on their own learning journey as they develop these other essential skills.

Students can record their daily work, reflect on their learning experiences and express their thoughts, which is a beneficial way to promote the continued development of SEL skills. Teachers can assess students and provide real-time feedback. It also helps students to share their work publicly and build confidence in learning. Get started with Spaces today!