Gamify Your Class

Whether you want to quickly assess your students understanding after a discussion or would like to have students perform assessments of their peer's understanding of their presentation, Kahoot can add a fun, gameshow atmosphere to your class.  Use iPads, Chromebooks, Lab computers or the students' smartphones!

So often, students give presentations, receive their grade, and that's it. But wouldn't it be great to find out if their audience actually learned anything from all of their hard work? Wouldn't student audience members pay more attention if they knew they were going to be playing a game using the information their peers shared?

Kahoot does what all of those sets of "clickers" and fancy software packages promised, but without the hassle of additional devices and almost no learning curve!

Once you've gotten an account,  you log in and choose what type of questions you want to ask.

Then when you're ready, project your quiz screen and students will see something like this.

Students would just need to go to Kahoot.it (on ANY device with internet access) and enter the game's pin number, enter a nickname (I'd suggest 1st name or Google username) and when you (or the gamemaster) starts the game, they'll see the 4 choices on their screen.

Please let me know if you'd like to start using this in your class, I'd be happy to co-plan a lesson with you!

Alien Assignment

Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning & Children's Media has created several apps for young children. My favorite is Alien Assignment. It's a free app available in the Apple app store (it's an iPhone app bus can be used on the iPad or iPod as well- iOS 4.3 or later). Children are introduced to the Gloop family of aliens whose ship has crashed landed and who need the child's help to fix it.


Through the camera feature on the device, children are asked to find objects and photograph them as examples of items the aliens could use to replace the broken parts of their ship. Directions are spoken and children must pay close attention so that they know what their photo assignment is. The open-ended assignments can lead to some
creative and out-of-the-box thinking when children are looking around the room. For example, the assignment to find something with buttons led to kindergartners locating buttons on classroom snowmen, a teacher's sweater, and the keyboard of the computer. Children can then be asked to justify their choices when reviewing their photos with an adult.

This one, simple, free app encourages active listening, following directions, creativity, critical thinking,
reasoning, problem solving, and camera use. It is recommended for ages 4 and up and would be an excellent choice for grades K-2. Extension activities could include partners assigning each other items to find and photograph or having children write their explanations for their photo choices.

Hour of Code

This week SATEC participated in the Hour of Code in celebration  of Computer Science in Education Week. While the younger students learned about giving step-by-step directions to achieve their goal on the iPads using Bee Bot, The Foos and the Daisy the Dinosaur apps, older students got to try websites like:
www.code.org
www.codecombat.com
www.playcodemonkey.com
www.madewithcode.com

All of these apps and resources are free to download and use!

It was a wonderful chance for all students throughout our SATEC community to share the focus of examining the role of technology in their daily lives and consider learning how to program and control that technology themselves.