Building Community through Student Engagement is Topic 3 and focuses on how to involve your students and families in the learning process.

In the first topic, you created a video to introduce yourself to your students. In the first activity of this topic, you'll take a look at FlipGrid, a free online tool that empowers student voice, as a way for students to introduce themselves to you and the class.

Staying connected with families during online learning is critical to the success of your students. In this activity, you'll look at two popular communication apps: Remind and Bloomz, and take some time exploring each and setting one up for your school year.

Synchronous learning is typically accomplished using Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams. In this activity, you'll get familiar with the platform your district is using through a number of tutorials. There are two articles to review and they both are chocked full of ideas and strategies for making this online meeting time active and engaging for your students.

Flipped Learning is a concept that has been around for several years in which the content is provided to students via video. In this activity, you'll take a deep dive into EdPuzzle, a free online video creator that allows you to embed questions directly into a video from major content providers such as Khan Academy and National Geographic. You can also look at the existing library of videos and edit to meet your needs.

Finally, digital citizenship is a critical element of online learning and Common Sense Media has created an essential list of lessons to teach the first weeks of school to set the foundation for digital citizenship for the remainder of the year.

There's lots to cover in this topic, so let's go to work!