Trello - 5 Fantastic Tips for Teachers

teacher or educate others so let's get started with lesson planning here we see a board which has been set up specifically for planning out a curriculum or planning out individual teaching components now Trello is made up of both lists which you see here as the vertical weeks and cards little white rectangles which usually represent just a short title or a and perhaps an image attached to it to help us identify what that card represents so the lists in this example represent the different weeks and here I can see my next four weeks out and then within those weeks I can have my individual lessons now the great thing about Trello is that you can drag and drop almost anything if I want to reorder the way in which I'm going to teach this particular component I can do so and if I want to swap it out for different weeks I can do that as well and just drag things into different lists but one of my favorite features of Trello is that it keeps my high-level view here nice and clean I can get a nice perspective of my lesson plan but then I can click on an individual card and get all of the details I can add complex notes I can add attachments or links to different websites I can have it all here contained within the card so as I go to teach this subject I can have all of my reference information available to me yet when I close the card I come back and get this nice high-level view you can also see from this board example that Trello is a very visual application here you can see I have a preview of the quiz that I'm going to give that day and I can also add different colored labels if I want them to represent different things here on different cards let's take a look at another example in this case we are

looking at a class project and I'm looking at the status of where they are within this project so here you can see this board has six different steps all listed across the top and in this case we have the cards are represented by the individual students so each student has their own individual card so as an instructor or as a teacher I can see exactly where someone is within this six step process at a glance I can see that the majority of my students are working on step number four and as Emily complete step number four moves to step number five I can simply drag and drop her name over here so this can be a great way for classroom management to see where someone is within a particular process where they are as they travel along the assignment spectrum or along the multiple steps within a particular assignment and of course I could always click on one of these student names and add even further descriptions or further details if I so desired let's take a look at example

number three now in this case we're looking at actually giving control or access to your students or if you like you could just use this as a reference material in this case I've set up a group rotation board so here you see I have different air is of the classroom or maybe different themes in which I want small groups of students to transition to on a regular basis so I can have the name of that particular group or rotation area I can have images and links directly to perhaps the video that I want them to watch in that space and the instructions for what I want them to do when they are working together in that area and then at the bottom of that particular list I have the group itself so here you can see the students have been grouped into groups of three when it's time to rotate it's as simple as just dragging that card over and dragging them into the next group and perhaps I don't always rotate them in a linear fashion so perhaps I want this group Anthony Gill and Elly I want them to come back to the timeline review so very easy to manage your groups in a rotation type of format and again you could use this as reference for yourself or perhaps you would give access to your students so that they can reference the instructions or the questions given to them and they can know exactly where they are in the rotation now the fourth example I want

to share with you today has to do with a student group project and in this case we would be creating a Trello board for your students to actually use so as an instructor you can set up many components of this car yourself for example the first one is just the project overview so here you can provide the detailed description of what they are going to accomplish and again you can add images and other reference material if you like in the second list we have the brain storm area and this is where we have our first deadline each and every card within Trello can be added a due date so you can put milestones you can put other due dates attached to each and every card and we see that with the first card in each of these lists from the project overview all the way to the final draft we also have a list of these students that are a part of this group so these the four students which are going to make up this group and they're going to work together on this research project and here are the different phases of this particular assignment again there is no limit on how many cards you can have in a particular list so in this research list I've also included past projects from other students that they can reference or that they can look to for inspiration as they complete their project and in the rough draft area you can even upload documents directly to Trello or if you use a service such as Google Drive you can link those documents directly to a Trello card again helping both your students and yourself to keep things very centralized in a nice clean-looking layout such as we see here within Trello now the fifth and

final way that I want to show you how to use Trello might be the most powerful or perhaps the most helpful to you your students and especially their parents I know as a parent myself it can often be challenging to keep up with all of the emails and the paper forms from my multiple kids at multiple schools as to what is going on but Trello can be a great way to create a class newsletter so in this example you will see the lists represent the different weeks and what has been going on and what is coming up so down below we have a nice image on the first card to give it a bit more of a visual appeal but now we also have further due dates as to what is going on that week what is happening and if I click on the after-school meeting for example your parents or whoever you give access to this board can see further details about that particular meeting so this can be a great way to encourage parents and also students to reference this information on their own of course you can email a link to this Trello board directly if you like if you'd like to do that on a weekly basis but you can also just give them the link so they can come back and reference this as you update the information that is listed here so a class newsletter a great way to not only see what is coming up but you can also keep a record here you can see the previous weeks here to the right how the previous class newsletters have looked like and what they have done before and let's say that you don't get to something maybe you didn't get to this dinner table discussion it's as easy as dragging it over to this list over here and now it's a part it still remains as a part of the class newsletter but people will be reviewing it here in the most recent week so I hope you enjoyed that brief tour of Trello and how you can use Trello within the classroom again I want to thank Jamie for having me here on teachers Tech and I would encourage you to subscribe right here to teachers tech for more tips and tricks and if you want to look for more ways to be more productive and to learn about the best productivity tools I would encourage you to subscribe to the simple tivity channel thanks again to Jamie and remember being productive does not need to be difficult in fact it's very simple