Group items tagged

"Growing up in the 80's meant reading loads of "Choose Your Own Adventure" books. They were fun, and a little scary, and you died pretty much every time, but they got lots of kids into books. Recently I decided to bring this idea off the page and into the 21st century by using Google Slides to create an online, interactive story. Often we think of Google Slides in terms of linear presentations, with one slide after another in order. However, Google Slides allows you to add hyperlinks to your presentation which can link to other slides within the presentation when clicked. This allows you to create a nonlinear slideshow, where the user can branch off to multiple different slides from any one slide. Linking to other slides can be used to create quizzes where each answer choice leads to a different slide to let you know if you got the correct answer. It can also be used to build an interactive "Choose Your Own Adventure" story where each slide offers choices that lead to different parts of the story. And so was born "Dragon Quest"!"

"Part of what makes games great is how subjective our enjoyment of them can be. The best games unravel in different ways for different people; we play them differently and in different contexts, changing what they mean to us. Unfortunately, when we evaluate games for the classroom we often don't consider how mutable they are. We see them as either containing a certain amount of educational content or not. Some games fit into this model, sure. But for games that are more akin to, say, modeling clay than quizzes -- the learning value is up for grabs; they need people to give them shape and context. On its face, Geoguessr -- a geography guessing game that tosses players into random parts of the world (using Google's Street View) -- doesn't seem to have much traditional educational value. There's not much to be memorized and used on a typical geography test. Players guess where they are rather than know it, and guessing is bad, right? Not quite. Because what Geoguessr gets kids to do is think about what the essence of geography is. It asks the player to consider "place" in every sense, not just from the perspective of a geographer. It asks the player to think like an anthropologist, a scientist, indeed - a detective. In fact, it's one of my go-to examples of "21st century literacy," that notoriously murky way of looking at the world that's tough to understand, let alone teach."

"BioMan Biology is the fun place to learn Biology! Here you will find learning games, review games, virtual labs and quizzes that will help you to learn about cells, ecology, genetics, physiology, and much more! Note: If you are a teacher, please check out the teacher section for ways to use the site to increase student engagement and learning. Remember, everything on this site is completely FREE to use!"

"Grab your mask and gloves and head on into the Dissection Lab for dissection photos, videos, worksheets, and quizzes!       Please note that these dissection images may be upsetting to some viewers."

"If you don't know about Subtext, you and your students are missing out! With an iPad app, a Web version, and integration with Edmodo, Subtext allows all students the ability to read and annotate a text together. Gone are the days of using sticky notes to mark pages and take notes. Take a dive into the 21st century with the most real-time close reading experience available. Teachers and students can annotate questions, quizzes, pictures, and discuss, all within the text using this fabulous tool."

"Flippity is a very good tool that you can use on Google  Spreadsheets to create flashcards and quizzes. The flashcards you create can be either printed or shared online through a generated link. The process to create a flashcard using Google Spreadsheet is pretty easy. Here is how to do it:"

"News-O-Matic is a service that offers daily news stories for elementary school students. Along with the news stories News-O-Matic provides videos, games, and quizzes to help students learn about the world. The latest update to the News-O-Matic iPad app introduced an option to quickly switch between an English and a Spanish version of the app."

"If you're looking for an awesome online report option for biographies or nonfiction texts, you'll love Hstry.co. Hstry is a site where students can create cool looking, interactive timelines with text, images, videos, and embedded quizzes.  These are really good looking timelines! If you don't believe me, check out this sample on World War I, or this one about the History of Immigration in theUnited States. And your students can create timelines that look just as good."

"Quizizz is a great web tool we discovered through Learning in Hand. Quizizz allows you to create interactive quiz games to use in your instruction for a number of educational purposes including formative assessment. Quiz games you create have up to 4 answer options including a correct answer. You can also add images to the background of your questions and customize the settings of your questions the way you want. When your quizzes are ready you can share them with your students using a generated 5 digit code."

"Nick Sigmon first encountered the idea of "grading for equity" when he attended a mandatory professional development training at San Leandro High School led by Joe Feldman, CEO of the Crescendo Education Group. As a fairly new high school physics teacher, Sigmon says he was open-minded to new ideas, but had thought carefully about his grading system and considered it fair already. Like many teachers, Sigmon had divided his class into different categories (tests, quizzes, classwork, homework, labs, notebook, etc.) and assigned each category a percentage. Then he broke each assignment down and assigned points. A student's final grade was points earned divided by total points possible. He thought it was simple, neat and fair."