Finally, after weeks of learning our routines, our technology, and the expectations of our classroom, we ventured into our first week of flex learning.

It was also Homecoming Week, golf districts, cross-country conference, the school blood drive, and two away games for volleyball, so it was a good time for students to move at their own pace since each day there would be a few students missing from classes.

To celebrate the first week, I dubbed it Mission Impossible and used the narrative for each of my three classes. Inspired by John Meehan’s Break-In games, I set up a slide deck with all of the “missions” of the week and the links to each of them. Each day I tracked student work using a traditional clipboard checklist to ensure that everyone stayed on track.

On Friday, everyone who completed all the missions on time rolled a 20-sided die to determine how much XP they earned (so 1=100, 20=2000).

The best part of the week were the hidden code words. Students could find up to three code words. I’d created JPGs of each of the codewords–mammoth, parka, and czar–and how they are words we’ve gained from the Russian language. I stored the JPGs in my Google Drive and linked them to images in the slidedeck and assignments. If they found the words, they earned a piece of candy, 20 HP, or 100XP.

Here are the slide decks below:

College Composition:

 

British Literature:

Applied Communications 12: