Hawaii Society for Technology in Education

Author: Leanna Ikei

O‘ahu Technology Coordinator

August 8, 2023

The beginning of every school year always has its challenge of balancing building relationships with students and completing pre-assessments. According to John Hattie’s updated list of 250+ influences on student achievement, building teacher-student relationships is ranked .48, meaning such bonds have the potential to accelerate student achievement. As educators, since we have only a short time during the day, here are three quick EdTech Tools you can use throughout the first month of the school year to quickly build relationships with your students:

Many teachers at my school enjoyed using Pixton in their classrooms. Each child is able to create an avatar that represents him/herself, which allows your students to embrace and celebrate their diverse identities. I noticed many students comment and admire their Pixton class photo throughout the school year! This school year, I hope to extend the use of students’ avatars and create comic strips that help them to summarize and teach other students about important concepts in core subject areas and topics.

How many of your students enjoy playing video games? My students enjoy playing Kahoot and Prodigy, and Blooket is another educational game website that I will use with my students this school year. Teachers create the questions based upon topics that they want students to answer.  Similarly to Kahoot, it will generate a code for players to join the game on their individual devices. Then, students answer the questions as best as they can to earn the most points to win. The best part of Blooket is there are various themes for students to try!  For the beginning of the school year, I would survey students on various get-to-know-you questions beforehand and see if students can guess who is the correct person.

Giphy is a Google App extension that is a search engine for animated GIFs.  We use Giphy in Google Docs and emails. Some teachers have used Giphy in their Google Slides to bring humor to displaying student work. To build relationships throughout the school year, students can find a GIF that resembles how they feel about a particular topic.

What are some EdTech Tools that you use at the beginning of the school year to encourage building relationships with your students? Tag us and share your thoughts at @hsteorg.