Resources discussed in Love In a Big World's SEL & 21st Century Learning: Tips for designing equitable, asynchronous content for early childhood classroom and home environments in a COVID-19 world with @Tamara Fyke @Mika Jain on August 25, 2020.
**GritX.org** – SEL program coming out of Young Adult and Family Center, located at the Weill Institute for Neuroscience on the campus of the University of California at San Francisco. Check out their virtual sketchbook, which students love. It's a glamorous version of Zoom's Whiteboard.
**Flipgrid** – Microsoft’s video discussion platform with over 100 million PreK-PhD educators! Check out their helpful YouTube tutorials and reach out to me if you have questions on how to utilize it with your students.
**Canva** – this is without a doubt the simplest design tool to create an infographic, flyer, or social media post for your students and families. An example is below, as well as on the header of this page. This took 30 seconds to make!
News Literacy Project – this organization is focused entirely on providing digital literacy resources for educators and the public to teach, learn, and share the ability to be a smart consumer of news and information.
**Bitmoji classrooms** are all the rage, as of August 2020. Most students love these visuals, though not every classroom needs to be a Bitmoji classroom. Here is an amazing resource from a teacher on Twitter.
**Medium** for writing blogs → here is an example!
**Notion** (this site) for creating colorful, shareable docs... need I say more?
Finally, check out this twitter thread for a number of SEL activities for virtual teaching generated by teachers over Zoom at this time. For example, you can create a "Netflix" themed get to know you icebreaker...simple!
These resources are for lead teachers and specialists alike. Having been an Art teacher myself for 3 years, I know we are the glue to a student's learning—often the class students most look forward to. It is a challenge to teach enrichment virtually, no doubt. Here are a few recommendations on how to integrate SEL into the virtual classroom.
**The Happy Chemicals** – This video is all about Dopamine, Oxytocin, Endorphins, Serotonin made by a friend and colleague, Dido Balla. Dido has many quick SEL videos for both educators and parents to share with students.
GritX's Customizable Breathing Ball (FREE!) – This is a wonderful, visual breathing resource for students. I cannot recommend this enough.
**Feelings Wheel** – This one is in Spanish, but there are plenty of feeling wheels that therapists and social workers use with clients. I recommend using these with your students! Give them multiple words to describe how they are feeling.
**How do you really feel** – Great to have for morning meeting and/or hanging in the background of your Zoom screen. As Marc Brackett would say: give yourself permission to feel.
