Good evening from Arizona where I'm relaxing after a great week of speaking at conferences in Texas, Kansas, and Arizona. Today, I had the honor of giving the closing keynote at the Native Innovation Education Conference in Flagstaff, Arizona. That conference was the second one this week that offered workshops on using technology to help teachers and students improve their physical fitness. It's great to see that trend.
Triventy is a free online quiz game platform that is similar in concept to platforms like Kahoot and Socrative. Triventy differentiates itself from the crowd by allowing you to accept question suggestions from students. You can see an overview of Triventy in this video that I published in January.
This week Triventy add a frequently requested feature. That feature is the ability to download a history of responses to quiz questions. At the end of every activity you can now download a spreadsheet of your students' responses to questions in your quiz game.
Applications for Education
One of the neat features of Triventy for students is that they can ask for a hint or to have an answer choice eliminated. Students can also see an explanation of the answer to each question.
Teachers can invite students to add questions to their games. Typically, as a homework assignment before running the game in class. This creates a comprehensive learning experience in which students are both ‘players’ and ‘tutors’ who share their knowledge with you and their classmates.
Teach Your Monster to Read is a great series of online games designed to help students improve the speed and accuracy with which they recognize letters and sounds. The website gets its name from the friendly monster avatars that students help learn to read through the course of the games.
The Teach Your Monster to Read games are designed to help students improve the speed and accuracy with which they recognize letters, sounds, and word. The games have eight levels (or islands as they're called in the game) each containing four activities. Students play the game as a friendly monster avatar. On each island students can earn prizes for their monsters and customize the look of their monsters.
All of this week I am on the road working with teachers in Texas, Kansas, and Arizona. Rather than scrambling to write blog posts at the end of each day, I'm taking this time to feature some of the most popular posts and new tools of the 2015-2016 school year.
On Sunday evening I shared a list of ten good sources of social studies videos. To keep the video source series going I've created a list of sources for educational science videos. Here are ten good sources of science videos for students and teachers.
On his website and YouTube channel
Montana's 2011 Teacher of the Year Paul Anderson has uploaded more than 300 quality instructional videos
like the ones about biology that are embedded below.
TED-Ed offers dozens of videos on a variety of topics in science. I created a playlist of TED-Ed videos about how the human body works. That playlist is embedded below.
Gooru is a service that aims to provide
teachers and students with an extensive collection of videos,
interactive displays, documents, diagrams, and quizzes for learning
about topics in math and science. As a Gooru member you have access to hundreds of resources according to
subject areas such as chemistry, biology, ecology, algebra, calculus,
and more. Within each subject area you can look for resources according
to media type such as video, interactive display, slides, text, and
lesson plans. When you find resources that you want to use, drag them to
the resources folder within your account. Gooru also offers you the
option to add resources to your folders even if you did not find them
within Gooru.
Learners TV has organized hundreds of academic videos. They've also organized more than one hundred science animations. The science animations on Learners TV are organized into three categories; biology, physics, and chemistry.
ScienceFix is the blog and YouTube channel
of middle school science teacher Darren Fix. On both the blog and the
YouTube channel you will find more than 100 videos demonstrating various
science experiments, demonstrations, and middle school science lessons.
Bright Storm's YouTube channel
offers video lessons for biology, chemistry, and physics. The videos
are nothing more than an instructor lecturing with a whiteboard for a
few minutes which could be adequate if a student just needs a refresher
on a science topic.
NASA has a few different YouTube channels, but the one that has the most universal utility for teachers and students is NASA eClips.
NASA eClips is organized according to grade level with playlists
intended for elementary school, middle school, and high school.
Reactions: Everyday Science is a YouTube channel that was formerly known as Bytesize Science. I have featured a few Bytesize Science videos in the past. Reactions: Everyday Science produces short explanatory videos about the science in common elements of our lives. In the past I've featured Reactions videos about the science of snowflakes and the science of grilled cheese.
John and Hank Green's Crash Course channel on YouTube includes courses in chemistry, ecology, and biology. They're good videos, but they do go quickly so your students might have to rewind them a couple of times to catch everything.
The Spangler Effect is a YouTube channel from Steve Spangler Science. Unlike his popular Sick Science videos which are no more than short demonstrations of science experiments students and parents can do at home, The Spangler Effect videos offer longer (15 minutes or so) explanations of science experiments. The Spangler Effect videos explain the science of do-it-yourself experiments and how you can recreate those experiments at home or in your classroom.
A note about Khan Academy: I left Khan Academy off the list because it's the best known source of educational videos. Sal Khan doesn't need my help promoting his stuff.
All of this week I am on the road working with teachers in Texas, Kansas, and Arizona. Rather than scrambling to write blog posts at the end of each day, I'm taking this time to feature some of the most popular posts and new tools of the 2015-2016 school year.
Create a contact group:
Creating and using contact groups can save you a lot of time when you're sending messages to groups of parents, colleagues, or students. Watch the video below to learn how to create a contact group.
Use Gmail offline, unsend a message, reply all vs. reply:
Setting your Gmail account for offline use is easy and makes it easy for you to work on email even when you don't have a connection to the Internet.
Every once in a while you might hit "send" a bit too early. The undo send function can rescue you from that situation.
No one likes to be copied on a email thread when they don't need to be. Make sure you know when to use "reply all" and when not to use it.
