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There is an explosion of EdTech tools destined to gamify the classroom, most of which are web-based, while others come in the form of an app. Understandably, a teacher might wonder what is the best way to navigate through this sea of new, and subsequently, not thoroughly tested activities and tools. Throughout the school year I tried several game-based platforms with my students. Here are three game-based classroom solutions that helped me transform my fourth grade classroom into a dynamic learning environment. All three tools are completely free. Each platform is particularly strong in specific areas, therefore, depending on their needs, teachers can utilize one of the tools, or use a combination of two (or three), to maximize the impact on student learning.

The first, and probably the most popular game-based classroom platform is Socrative. A prominent member of the “audience response systems” family, Socrative is a powerful tool that offers many options to teachers. It is also one of the most diverse and adaptive of all platforms, as it offers three different highly customizable modes: the typical question-based game mode, a mode called “space race” which is a mode that aims to combine accuracy and speed, and a third mode called “Exit Ticket”, which can best be used at the end of a lesson as a means of taking the pulse of the classroom.

16 Flipped Classrooms From Around The World

This explosion in the technology has increased efforts to equip every classroom with computers and "wire" every school to the Internet. Between September 1984 and September 1997 alone, the number of computers in America's K-12 schools increased elevenfold to more than 8 million units.1 Educators have been forced to keep up, and some are finding themselves teaching general skills in how to use a computer while they use them to teach other subjects.

Why Kids Need Schools to Change

“There’s probably no better example of the throttling of creativity than the difference between what we observe in a kindergarten classroom and what we observe in a high school classroom,”

“For developing creativity and flexible and divergent thinking, we need to bring back the arts,”

As a college professor that is *not* primarily working with education majors, I found this entire piece deeply troubling. The pedagogies described here are *exactly* those that we tell our new faculty not to use– the lecture died a quiet death on my campus 25+ years ago in the humanities, and is on the way out (finally) in the natural sciences. The flipped classroom, as such, has been the norm in history, English, philosophy, etc. for a generation or more. So why are high school teacher still droning on before a roomful of sleepy teens? No wonder our first-year students have such a hard time adapting to an active learning classroom environment when they start college.