Worldle Daily - A Street View Game

The Wordle craze seems to have settled down a bit since its height earlier this year (or at least fewer people are sharing their scores on social media). That hasn't stopped developers from creating many variations on the game. One such variation that I recently tried is Worldle Daily. 

Worldle Daily is a combination of the Wordle concept and Google Street View imagery. The game is played by looking at a featured Street View image then trying to guess, by clicking on a map, where in the world that image was captured. After each guess you're shown how far away you are from being correct. A circle covering the area in which the image was taken is also displayed after each guess. As you get closer, the circle gets smaller until you either use up all of your guesses or guess correctly. 

Here's my short video overview of how to play Worldle Daily. 

Applications for Education
Worldle Daily is free to play and doesn't require registration in order to play it. Playing the game could be a fun way for students to practice using the context clues in Street View imagery to identify places around the world. Likewise, it could be a fun way to discover new and interesting landmarks. For example, today's correct answer featured a giant cowboy statue on Route 66 in Oklahoma.

Learning How to Tell Time on Analog Clocks and Watches

My oldest daughter got a little analog wristwatch for her birthday a few days ago. So far she loves wearing it (she wanted to wear it to bed last night) and is rather quickly learning how to tell time with it. As you might expect, the watch has prompted a few questions including "how does it work?" If you students or children of your own who need to learn how to tell time on an analog watch, here are a couple of good resources to explore. 

ABCya offers a free game called the Time Travel Game that is designed to help student practice telling time. The concept of the game is that students are given a prompt like "set the clock to 4am" and they have to move the hands of the clock to the correct position. Each level of the game contains ten prompts. A little rocket ship is launched when they correctly answer the ten prompts on a level. I played the game this morning and I would highly recommend that students either play it on a touch screen or use a mouse rather than a trackpad to move the hands of the clock in the game. 

What Time Is It? is an activity book template available from Canva. The template has ten pages. Each page has a clock on it and a prompt like "it's eleven." Students have to draw in the hands of the clock to match the prompt on the page. As this is a Canva template, you can make a copy and modify it for your students' needs. 

Animagraffs has a popular video that explains how a mechanical watch works. The animations combined with the voiceover make it easy to understand how the parts of a watch work together to keep time. 

Read Write Think Animal Inquiry

This morning I'm taking my daughters to a little petting zoo near our home. They love to pet the goats, sheep, ponies, horses, and bunnies. Both of my daughters love learning about animals and they are both learning to write right now. Thinking about those things reminded me of a writing template hosted by Read Write Think.

Read Write Think's Animal Inquiry template is an online graphic organizer template that students fill in as they learn about animals and or fill in from memory. It's a simple template that doesn't require students to sign-up or sign into any kind of account which makes it perfect for elementary school use. On the same page that you find the template you will also find some suggested lesson plans that you can access for free.

In this short video I demonstrate how to use Read Write Think's Animal Inquiry template.



Back in January Read Write Think relaunched all of their popular interactive writing templates and activities for students. Here's a list of some of my favorite RWT templates. 

A Simple Tool for Finding Related Search Keywords

Brainstorming lists of alternative words and phrases is one of the strategies that I have students use when conducting online research. Doing this before they start a search and or whenever they feel stuck can help them generate new search result pages that doesn't duplicate the results of their previous queries. But sometimes our brainstorming sessions need a little jumpstart. That's when a tool like Keyword.io can be helpful. 

On Keyword.io you can enter a search term and have a list of related search terms generated for you. These are different and more comprehensive lists than Google's default "people also search for..." suggestions. 

Applications for Education
It should be noted that Keyword.io is a service that is designed for search engine optimization and search engine marketing professionals. For that reason, you'll see a lot of ads for purchasing marketing products that Keyword.io offers. You can ignore those ads and just look at the lists that are generated for free. Those lists can help you and your students come up with some new search terms to use when conducting online research in Google, Bing, and elsewhere.

On a related note, you might also be interested in these articles that I've previously published about search strategies:

• How Excluding Words Helps to Narrow the Scope of a Search
• Five Benefits of Conducting Mind Mapping Exercises

Two Resources to Help Make Virtual & Hybrid Learning More Equitable & Effective

This is a guest post from Dr. Beth Holland (@brholland), Research & Measurement Partner at The Learning Accelerator (TLA) - a national nonprofit.

As the school year ramps up again, teachers and leaders have to confront the same challenge that has been plaguing schools since the start of the pandemic: how to develop more effective, engaging, and equitable virtual or hybrid learning environments. However, a major challenge exists in the field: there are few models to help educators define quality in virtual and hybrid contexts.

At The Learning Accelerator (TLA), we have designed two, freely-available, research-based resources to address this need. Our individual self-assessment survey and team assessment tool serve as catalysts for conversations that can lead to improvement, provide a concrete means to identify quality, and help educators, schools, and districts to identify what really might be affecting their students’ experiences within virtual or hybrid settings.

Resource #1: Individual Self-Assessment Survey
Using a research report describing the Key Factors that Help Drive Virtual and Remote Learning Quality as a framework, we designed a self-assessment survey that asks individuals to rate either their level of confidence or the likelihood that certain factors exist in their context. For example, within the Pedagogy section, questions ask individuals to indicate how confident they feel that students experience elements of mastery-based learning such as “giving and receiving feedback from peers.”

Although this self-assessment was designed to be the first step of a team process at the district-level, individual teachers could certainly use it to understand ways in which they might make improvements within their own classrooms. Coaches might review the questions with teachers to identify areas of support, and principals could leverage the questions to gain an understanding of what might be happening across classrooms or grade levels.

Resource #2: Team Assessment Tool
Where the self-assessment captures individual perceptions, the team assessment identifies the prevalence of different factors in context. This tool uses the same survey questions as the self-assessment, but instead of asking individuals to rate their confidence, it prompts teams to use a modified version of the Stoplight protocol to determine whether factors occur consistently, in pockets, or not at all. This second tool also prompts teams to add evidence to support their observations.

For example, one district in our Strategy Lab: Virtual & Hybrid cohort indicated that they consistently “prioritize building relationships with students.” In addition to describing evidence such as having an advisory structure and regular individual meetings with students, the district also noted that 81% of their students responded favorably to a culture survey question asking whether they had a positive relationship with an adult.

Although initially designed to support district teams, teacher teams could also use this tool to better understand students’ experiences across classrooms. Similarly, principals or coaches might form teams to identify areas for improvement across grade levels.

Next Steps
We have already started to see how these two resources can foster meaningful, evidence-based dialogue. As teachers and leaders launch into the new school year, we hope that they can continue to help to identify areas for improvement so that every student experiences a more equitable, engaging, and effective learning environment – whether in-person or online.

• Individual Self-Assessment
• Team Assessment