Kahoot! and other games in the curriculum

Playing a Kahoot! game is a very popular MS classroom activity. Students and teachers create games in world languages, music and science. Kahoot! is a web-based tool that allows asking a consecutive, quiz-show type questions using a game-based format. Students respond by joining a game through a unique number using any mobile device.

A list of other teacher's favorite classroom games:

• Quizlet Live - create a collaborative classroom game
• Socrative is a student response system that works across all devices. Teachers can ask a number of different question types and gather student data for formative assessment.
• TinyTap - create fun games, personalized puzzles, question and answer activities, turn reading a book into an interactive activity, make a tappable sound boards.
• Quia - an online platform to create quizzes, games, and assignments online. There are wide range of games: flashcards, matching, challenge board, hangman, rags to riches, pop-ups and more. Examples of student created 7th grade games in history:

• Dominican Republic
• Guatemala
• Belize

Upper School Tech Byte #5- Kahoot and Padlet

At this morning's Upper School faculty meeting, Spanish teacher Caroline shared the tech tool Kahoot (whose tag ling is "Make Learning Awesome!") by simulating a game being played in the Spanish classroom along with the help of 10 volunteer teachers who acted as the students in her "classroom."  Teachers go to get kahoot to create an account and set up a game, while students go to kahoot it and enter the teacher's code during class to play the game.  This tool can be used as a form of formative assessment to gauge student understanding in a creative and fun way.  The volunteer teachers certainly had a blast this morning, as did many of the audience members!  If you have a minute, take a look at Edudemic's "Ultimate Guide to Gamifying your Classroom."  Richard Byrne, author of the Free Tech 4 Teachers blog, listed kahoot last December as one of "15 Good Tools for Quickly Gathering Feedback from Students."  Also included in those 15 was Padlet...

At the end of the faculty meeting this morning, attendees were asked to fill out an "exit ticket" by sharing one piece of constructive feedback regarding Tuesday's professional development day using the website padlet.  For more information on how to use padlet, check out this blog article by Richard Byrne on Free Tech 4 Teachers.  You can also check out "5 Ways to Use Padlet in the Classroom" by Education World.  Lastly, if you decide to use it in your classroom, view this step-by step guide on "How to use Padlet: A Fantastic Tool for Teaching" by Vicki Davis of coolcatteacher.com.

Brief Redux of AERA 2014 and Participatory Learning

I was at the American Education Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting in Philadelphia a couple of weeks ago, and in addition to meeting a whole slew of amazing scholars, particularly in the field of the Learning Sciences, I was greatly encouraged by the research and work being done with technology in support of student learning. Interest in educational technologies is growing fast, and is gaining a lot of momentum due to large philanthropic organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Macarthur Foundation, both of which seem to be fueling a rapidly innovating field. This is exciting. In years past, it seems that much of the research being done in education technology surrounded behaviorist theories of cognition and learning, and focused heavily on the concept of “transfer” - being able to apply the knowledge gained in one domain in other areas. Nowadays, it seems that “learning as participation” has garnered a lot of attention, placing a much-needed focus on student autonomy, authority, and the production of learning artifacts. These form much of the basis of student-centered pedagogies, and are part of the growing popularity in interest-driven learning, such as maker-spaces and digital media hubs, and even “gaming*”.

*I put the word “gaming” here in quotes, because typically, the term “educational game” inspires a lot of suspicion and skepticism, and belief that “gaming” is synonymous with “entertainment”. A lot of media attention and venture capital have been given to educational games that fit this description, and while this is great for Silicon Valley, such games have questionable value for education on the whole (test preparation, maybe, but critical thinking, collaboration, civic action?). But while these entertainment games seem to dominate our perception of gaming in school, there has been considerable research done on what aspects of games actually foster learning, and promote engagement, persistence, and reflection. Anyone familiar with James Paul Gee’s work for instance, will tell you that education has a lot to learn about gaming, without watering down content, or sacrificing rigor, in favor of entertainment.

A great primer on the “participation as learning” approach is Henry Jenkins’ work on “Participatory Culture”. Basically, this approach to learning suggests that by engaging in community-based practices, such as collaborating on a media project together, contributing to the knowledge of fan forums (such as the Minecraft forum), remixing songs or other cultural artifacts, we are in a sense, learning by doing - coordinating distributed knowledge resources (people, tools, websites, etc.) across multiple multimedia, jointly solving problems (especially community-based problems), appropriating materials to remix them for an audience, apprenticing people into the valued practices and ways of thinking about the world around us.

A central part of this type of learning is developing literacies across multiple domains, and applying those literacies in ways to empower our students and ourselves. Nichole Pinkard, whose work focuses on youth-based programs for developing digital literacies. Through the use of mentors to learn various digital tools, students in Pinkard’s Digital Youth Network who develop a strong passion for a medium can then go on to mentor younger/less-experienced students with similar interests.

Another significant aspect of this type of learning, and one is seems to be just finally gaining some legitimacy in schools, is social networking - building connections across settings to access knowledge resources. Facebook and Twitter come to mind as obvious examples of social networking, and these have largely been used for un-academic purposes. But that does not mean they are not powerful tools for things like mobilizing political action (remember the Arab Spring?), or building connections with professionals and experts in a field (see Jen Lavenberg’s post on Personal Learning Networks).

These areas of participation and learning are invaluable for our children, especially since many of them are already doing these things. The trouble is that many children might not see the connection between participating in digital ecologies and “what counts” as learning in school. The question we need to start asking, is how we can legitimize their participation as a valued part of learning, and how we can incorporate the vast range of resources we now have access to into ways of teaching that actually empower students.

5th Grade Math Students Pilot "The Lure of the Labyrinth"

This year, fifth graders in my math group piloted "The Lure of the Labyrinth," an interactive website at http://labyrinth.thinkport.org/www/. The site is designed to provide practice with essential math skills for students in the middle grades. The premise of the game is simple: after students have created a cartoon character for themselves, complete with monster costume and pet, they are informed, through a sequence of comic strips, that their pet has just been kidnapped by monsters. Their mission is to rescue their pet -- by traversing a labyrinth of rooms, each of which contains a puzzle centered around a particular math skill. One unique characteristic of the site is that the instructor, in the process of creating an account, sets up an educator account, which gives them access to data revealing how much each student has played, which puzzles they have mastered, and how far they have advanced into the Labyrinth. It is therefore possible to monitor, assign, and assess learning through the website.


Perhaps the greatest strength of the game, however, is that the practice, though it targets important fourth and fifth grade math skills, is not drill-based. Each puzzle presents an interesting problem that requires creative thinking to solve. For example, students use the notion of common multiples to select portions for monsters' lunch trays in the cafeteria, or solve algebraic equations in many variables as they pore over hieroglyphs in an underground cave. So, while they are never asked, "What is the least common multiple of 25 and 5?", they have a rich experience that leaves them with a greater depth of understanding of that question's underlying meaning. The result is a meaningful exploration of central skills... that's a lot more fun than worksheets!


-Ellie Cowen
5th and 6th Grade Math

ATS Picks 11/04/10

The theme of this week's ATS picks is History/Social Studies

1) Online History Games
Playing History is a forum and rating website for over 126 online history-related games for teachers and students alike. The games are compiled and organized by topic, difficulty, general ratings, and much more. The search tool is also very helpful and easy to use when trying to find a specific game. Playing History is also user-friendly, allowing students and teachers to post reviews, scores, and comment on feedback of the website itself. Although not all of the games have consistently high ratings, Playing History is a great place to find educational games online for students to learn more about a particular subject.

2) National Archives Experience: Digital Vaults
The NARA Digital Vaults is an interactive exploration of history that examines thousands of documents, photographs, and pieces of history that have been integrated in a digital format. Upon entering the homepage, the user is given eight random archives to choose from. Clicking on one will give a description and a brief history of that archive, as well as displays a large variety of similar archives. The user has the ability to shuffle, rearrange, collect, and explore archives, as well as search for specific points in history using a keyword search. Although a lack of initial organization or index might seem overwhelming, Digital Vaults is a wonderfully imaginative resource for exploring history in a digitally compiled way.
Sponsored by the National Archives and Records Administration

3) Life Magazine's Civil Rights: Women in the Struggle
Life.com presents a photo gallery of famous women in the struggle for civil rights. Each photo provides a concise description of the importance of each woman, along with links providing more information. Although the collection is not very extensive, each of the fifteen photos provides a unique insight into an important part of a movement that largely goes underrepresented. As far as a general resource, this website is a good start to further student research and understanding, albeit not very comprehensive.

4) EdtechTeacher's Best of History: Games and Animations
The Games and Animations section of EdTechTeacher's Best of History sites is a list of fun history games and animations organized around broad historical periods. Most of these games and animation are aimed at students ages 10-16.

ATS Picks 10/8/10

1) Ways to Use Voicethread in the Classroom

The Digital Library is a database of articles about successful VoiceThread projects. Our hope is to create a resource that offers guidance and inspiration for people undertaking new projects.

2) Internet4Classrooms... Helping You Use the Internet Effectively

At this site there are a large number of games that kids can play that help review math, social studies and language arts skills. The games are organized by grade level and the site is very easy to navigate.

3) Sketchcast... a New Way to express yourself

Record a sketch with or without voice. Explain something, have fun, or create art. Then embed the sketch player in your blog or point people to your sketch channel.

4) VocabGrabber- Visual Thesaurus

VocabGrabber analyzes any text you're interested in, generating lists of the most useful vocabulary words and showing you how those words are used in context. Just copy text from a document and paste it into the box, and then click on the "Grab Vocabulary!" button. VocabGrabber will automatically create a list of vocabulary from your text, which you can then sort, filter, and save.

Select any word on the list and you'll see a snapshot of the Visual Thesaurus map and definitions for that word, along with examples of the word in your text. Click on the word map or the highlighted word in the example to see the Visual Thesaurus in action.