Try Quizalize to Run a "Quiz Night" for Students & Parents

Last week in Atlanta a teacher asked me about the possibility of running a "Kahoot night" in which her students and their parents would play Kahoot games at home together. There were two problems she was running into in organizing that idea. The first problem was timing the event so that everyone would sign-in at the same time. The second problem was that students couldn't see the answer choices for the quiz. My solution for her was to try using Quizalize instead of Kahoot to host a quiz night for students and their parents.

Quizalize is a quiz game platform that will remind you of Kahoot. Like Kahoot, students play your quiz games on their laptops or tablets by going to the Quizalize website then entering their names and a class code. Students are awarded points for correctly answering questions quickly. Students are given feedback instantly on every quiz question that they answer. A total score is presented to students at the end of every quiz. What's different about Quizalize is that you can have students play a quiz game as a classroom activity or you an assign to them to play at home. Either way that they play students receive immediate feedback and can track their own progress on a game when they play it multiple times.

In the video embedded below I provide an overview of how to create, distribute, and track quiz games in Quizalize.

Resources for Teaching About Veterans Day

This coming Friday is Veterans Day and schools across the US will be closed. Try one or more of the following resources to help students understand the origins and meaning of Veterans Day.

Bet You Didn't Know: Veterans Day. The video explains the origins of the holiday and why its date of celebration has twice shifted in the United States. The end of the video includes an explanation of the differences between Memorial Day and Veterans Day. PBS News Hour has a basic lesson plan about Veterans Day. That lesson plan includes giving this quiz to students before showing them Bet You Didn't Know: Veterans Day


NBC News offers the following short audio slideshow about the history and meaning of Veterans Day.

ReadWorks offers a selection of texts about Veterans Day. The passages include questions for discussion. ReadWorks offers texts for all grade levels.

For more resources on Veterans Day, see this list created by Larry Ferlazzo.

Protect Student Privacy With Face Blurring In YouTube

In the last week I have given a couple of presentations about creating and editing videos in the classroom. In both presentations I shared how to blur faces and places in your YouTube videos. Doing that can be a good way to protect the privacy of students who don't want their images to appear in school videos that are posted online. In the YouTube video editor you can select which faces and objects you want to blur in your videos.

In the video embedded below I demonstrate how to blur faces and objects in your YouTube videos.



Applications for Education
Sharing video highlights of school events can be a great way to build community interest in the good things that are happening in your school. The challenge that many teachers and administrators run into is making sure that the privacy requests of parents are honored.

How to Create MadLibs Story Starters in Google Sheets

Last week I wrote about Flippity's free template for creating MadLibs story starters in Google Sheets. I have received a handful of questions about how to use that template. This evening I made the following short video to address those questions.


Applications for Education
Using your MadLibs-style stories could be a fun way for your students to practice identifying parts of speech. When they use verb instead of a noun in a MadLibs-style story, the story doesn't make quite as much sense as it should have.

If you have students that are comfortable using spreadsheets, they could use the Flippity template to create and share their own MadLibs-style story templates to share.

A Lesson on the First U.S. Presidential Election

In my previous post I shared a video from Keith Hughes in which he explains the origins of the Electoral College. It's a great explanation of the original arguments for and against the creation of the Electoral College which has chosen every President beginning with George Washington. Keith offers a lesson about that first election. In three minutes Keith runs-down what made the first election different from all that have come after it.


Applications for Education
After watching the video above ask your students to think about how campaigns today would be different without social media, television, or radio. Or flip that concept and have them use tools like this fake Facebook template to develop a social media advertising campaign for George Washington.