Online AMA review session

AMA stands for Ask Me Anything.  I've scheduled two AMA sessions for my students in advance of next Friday's APUS exam.

Here's how it will work: First, I'll create a classroom in Today's Meet.

Then I'll share the classroom code with my students via Remind.

Today's Meet is a form of online open classroom.  Under the AMA format, I'll moderate the discussion, answering any questions that my students have.  I can also mix it up by asking other students to try to answer questions.  When (or if) things slow down, I'll have prepared review questions of my own to get the students active and engaged.

School's closed, but I'm still meeting with my students (virtually)

Our school district outside Washington, D.C., closed yesterday and is closed today, in advance of the approaching (predicted) blizzard.  But I still wanted to keep in touch with my students.  So I made arrangements to meet them in a virtual classroom.

I created a virtual classroom for today's lesson in TodaysMeet, then I alerted my students that it was open for them by sending them a Remind text notification.  Here's a video (4:11) on how to use TodaysMeet.

I announced this as an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session.  Students are invited to ask me anything about our class, what we're studying, or other related/relevant topics.  I'm looking forward to this!

A reminder about why you should be using Remind: Sending text notifications to your students

We haven't had school in our district just outside Washington, D.C., the past two days because of the weather.  So I've kept in touch with my students by using Remind.

Remind is a far superior method of contacting our students than email.  Maybe this has happened to you, too: A student emails me a question.  I write back an answer within minutes.  Then the next day the student asks me, "Did you see I wrote to you last night?"  (Students are good sending emails, but not so good about checking for a response.)  So I use Remind.  It sends a message to them where they are, directly to their smartphone.

I also like Remind because it creates a safe environment for me to send text message alerts directly to my students (and the parents who also can register to receive them).  I call Remind "safe" because my texts are not sent from my phone, I can never see the personal cell phone number of anyone receiving my texts, and all messages are permanently stored on Remind's server.

The Remind support materials are terrific.  Here's the link to its Help Center, which has articles on topics like product updates, a getting started guide, and information about making changes to your account.

Remind also has its own channel on YouTube.  There you can find 22 excellent short video tutorials on how to use Remind.  This video (1:02) discusses how Remind works.