“Stop playing around and focus on your work!” is something you could probably imagine your teachers from your childhood saying to you or your classmates, but what if students could actually learn by playing? Today in 2018, it is a real possibility! Gamification involves taking content you’d regularly teach in your classroom and turning all of part of it into a game for your students. Alternately, game based learning is when students actually learn the content through the process of playing a game. Some of the games my students play at school include content from many different subject areas. My students sometimes play games from code.org, which is wonderful, because they learn about coding without me having to learn myself how to teach coding. Google’s Be Internet Awesome games teach the students digital citizenship values that we discuss in class, Prodigy Math teaches math concepts through multiplayer games where kids can connect with classmates. Sumdog,is similar, but my students tell me that Prodigy is more fun and has more challenging math questions. ST Math is a school adopted program used at my site, where students learn math concepts by solving math puzzles. There is no reading and no words involved which is great for language learners. Some of our other school adopted programs include games the students often play, such as Edutyping and Fastt math after they have completed their “lesson” for the day. We also use games within our district adopted math curriculum. These games allow students to practice skills we taught in class, and often implement the usage of manipulatives. With all of these great and varied games, my objective for my students is to have them enjoy learning and practicing skills across subject matter in a way that is engaging and interactive for them. The students enjoy playing these games. and many times they are also learning important computer skills such as typing, clicking and dragging, etc. Sometimes I consider these to be more programs than games, but as long as I feel that they are valuable learning experiences I’m happy to let my students play! Clearly, as great at all of these games may be- most of them are best suited for introduction, practice, or review of content taught and discussed in class. It’s possible to use the games in conjunction with other good teaching practices, either before or after- or even both, to give all types of learners the opportunity to access the material. It would not be good teaching practice to have learning be completely game based with no discussion or instruction of content, but at the same time, it would be hard to imagine teaching today without any games, digital or otherwise. Finding a balance within gamification and game based learning is important for a 21st century classroom, and can make for happy teachers and learners. Here is the video I created to highlight some of my favorite technology tools to use in the classroom!
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This class has helped me to make my research and ideas more applicable in my classroom, to my capstone project, and to a global community of teachers. I now have an audience in mind for my research and the projects I have been working on. I feel that my work now has more meaning and purpose beyond just myself and my classroom. I now feel empowered to share my ideas with my coworkers and other teachers around the world. I also feel equipped with more tools for sharing my ideas with teachers. Focusing on goal setting has helped my students over the past few years, and through this class I feel that it has become even more effective as I was able to make it more technology based, and the students are engaged and enjoying the process a lot more than they had been before.
The challenges I had throughout this course were actually with making sense of information, especially with the more dense or abstract readings such as Dervin and Clark. The readings I enjoyed most were the articles, and even more the videos. Reading Baggio was very eye opening and helped me to understand a lot of why certain things we did in class did or did not make sense to me. It helped me to understand why I like getting information from videos, as I found out auditory is one of the ways I learned best, along with visual. Also reading November for my book review and having an interactive project to create helped me to really process the information- and in the spirit of the book- own my learning in regard to the information presented in the book. At the end of this semester, I am feeling more confident about my capstone project- but still a bit nervous about how much work it is going to be to accomplish it. I am hoping that a lot of what we have already done in this semester and the previous, it will just fall into place. I’m excited to have that ready to share with coworkers, friends and family to highlight the work I’ve been doing throughout this program.I also hope that I can take my work further and share it globally. I’d love to see goal setting integrated into more K-12 classrooms to give students agency and lifelong learning skills. This week we were tasked with trying out 2 new tools that could be used in a flipped classroom setting. I tried out Adobe Spark, I remember seeing some really nice presentations some of my cohort members made with the tool in the past, but I hadn’t realized that this was a web based tool with a free version. I thought it was something that required software, downloads, or a paid subscription. I was excited to try it out, and immediately was able to download and import slides from a presentation I’m working on in my other class. What I appreciate about Adobe Spark is how visually appealing the videos it creates are, and how you can add narration to the individual slides. One major problem I’ve been having with screencasting is that I tend to misread or misspeak mid presentation and it’s extremely difficult to edit the sound without starting all over. Since the current presentation has a 10 minute limit, I’ve been concerned about getting to minute 8 or 9 and then having an issue. It’s nice that they have stock background music and images you can plug in to make your presentation more pleasant.
The next tool I tried was Edpuzzle, I like how it is connected with google classroom and I can import my students from there. I am currently almost in shock about the fact that I’ve never heard of Edpuzzle. It’s such an interesting tool with a lot of possibilities for use. This seems like it might be the best tool for a flipped classroom because you can easily pull in resources that were already created and add or subtract content from them to meet your learner’s needs. I am now hoping to use this tool for an upcoming animal unit with my second graders. It’s really pretty advanced and impressive, and user friendly enough for most tech savvy teachers to use. I could see this being a bit of a time consuming task to stitch together videos and add voice, but at the same time extremely useful for certain units I teach that could be saved for the following years. It’s also so nice to be able to collaborate in a sense with teachers from around the world by borrowing their content and creating and sharing their own. That saves on time since you don’t have to recreate your own videos! Vocaroo was the final tool I tested out this week. It is a super simple voice recording website where you can record audio and save it. It’s all online and they give you many share/download options. I could see this being used to insert audio into presentations, google forms, etc.It seems like the most simplistic and user friendly tool out of the bunch, but it isn’t extremely versatile. You can just record and share audio, plus it’s hosted on their website for you. It’s nice that there is a free and easy tool to do this, as finding one can sometimes be an issue! It does say an improved version of vocaroo is coming out, so I wonder what new capabilities that might have, as I could see a login being useful so that users could log in to view and share their past recordings. I have really enjoyed having the opportunity to try out new tech tools this semester. I have integrated a lot of them into my classroom routine and I am excited about that. My second and third grade students really seem to appreciate using these new tools, and have been working on Google Classroom, Google Forms, Google Slides with Slides Carnival, and more lately. I appreciate the task of testing out new things that I can actually use in my classroom that make learning more engaging, make it easier for me to teach or to share info with other teachers, or allow my students to share their work with a broader audience. I am now in the process of creating a prototype to address my driving question with audience of learners (which I have selected as other teachers, beginning teachers or student teachers). My driving question is: How can technology be used to implement goal setting procedures with elementary school students? I wasn’t sure what level to write my guide at because, knowing the variance in my audience there are going to be teachers on all sides of the technology spectrum. I am going to try to address this by creating parts that explain my technology tool for those who aren’t there yet, but that won’t contain any important info about goal setting so that teachers who already understand the tool can skip ahead and still learn how to use the tool in the way I am recommending. I am excited about this project because it now has a purpose for me- to help other educators understand how to use goal setting practices with their students online, and to inspire them to try it by helping them to understand why it can be important and what the benefits are.
Creating my prototype is currently a little ambiguous because I am unclear on exactly what my implementation and outcome will look like. I know that I will be creating a website that other teachers can access that will house all of my research and information on the topics I have been researching and studying. Some of the things that I hope to do in my capstone project are to videotape myself and my students in the goal setting process at school on Google Classroom. I am hoping to get parent permission for at least a few students so that I can use their videos of them either explaining Google classroom and how we use it for goal setting, demonstrating it, or answering interview questions about it. I also would like to get a clip of myself teaching a goal setting lesson so that teachers can see the types of discussions we have in my classroom regarding goals. I’m both excited and overwhelmed by this project at this point it time. I know that I have a lot to do, but I hope that it is going to be an effective and useful tool for other teachers. I’m looking forward to having the project complete, but also looking forward to all the possibilities for where this could take me and other teachers. Google Forms is a useful tool for many situations. Our school district uses forms to get feedback from teachers about curriculum, meetings, technology concerns and more. This year, I sent out a google form survey to parents regarding the homework projects I have been assigning to students this year. I had not considered how I could use forms with my students until this course- but I have since created and given my students a form so that I could get feedback from them on my goal setting procedures, which is what I am focusing my research on this year.
Related to using google forms in the classroom, I will be collecting data from these forms to use in my capstone project for Touro. My capstone is related to student agency and goal setting using technology. I have already used google forms to collect my baseline data on student thoughts and feelings regarding goal setting on paper, and now I plan to use the tool to collect information on their thoughts and feelings regarding goal setting using technology. After that, I plan to collect data from my student’s parents. I want to do this to see whether the students are talking about and working on their goals at home, and taking responsibility for their work, and how families feel about the activities related to goal setting and student agency that their students participated in this year. This will help me in my research, as well as my future planning for goal setting with students. I have been familiar with Google Forms since attending University for my bachelors degree, but I haven’t found tons of uses for it in the classroom. One issue with implementation being that my students are not 1:1 with devices, which can make it more challenging to use the tool to quickly collect data. However, after giving the students just one survey on google forms and seeing the data in Google Sheets- I am seeing a huge benefit here in the time saving aspect of the tool. Especially in comparison with the way I collected data in my previous semester and put it into sheets myself- creating titles and sorting data took some time that was saved with the use of the tool. I am also finding more innovative ways to apply the tool in relation to my student’s learning, parent feedback and my research project. I will definitely continue to explore with Google Add ons and use Google Forms in the future. |
AuthorKayla Bryant is an elementary school teacher in Napa, CA. This year she teaches a 2/3 combo class. She keeps a journal with funny quotes from her students, and enjoys learning and laughing alongside them. Some of her main educational interests are related to goal setting, growth mindset, and creativity. Archives
July 2018
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