Week 13 - Bringing phones into the classroom

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Teaching with mobiles?! 

That's right! Many teachers today have already discovered the advantages there are in this method. Start asking your students to pull out their cell-phones from under their desks and have them use their devices for learning purposes.

So this week I would like to share my ideas about two tools I especially liked.

1. Kahoot! - this tool has become really popular in many schools (yes, even in Israel). Basically, in this website you will be able to create an engaging quiz using videos, pictures and diagrams, create a survey, or a discussion board. The students in class will have to log into a different Kahoot website for participants or download the app.Try not to overdo it though, so it doesn't lose it's novelty. 

Ideas: I've used this tool in class before for a 10th grade class. The goal of the game was to introduce the lesson's topic in order to get the students to start thinking about it. Later on when we discussed the topic, the students were able to participate and share well developed ideas.

Another idea is to use this tool to leave a few minutes at the end of the lesson to quickly assess the students understanding of new material taught in class. I have also seen a Kahoot before that a teacher used as a quiz for a book learned in class.

Pros: the game is very easy to create, students love this game because it is so interactive, the game is built like a competition and rewards the top participants with points - this motivates them to keep going, and lastly, some teachers publicly share their "Kahoot"s so there's an option of recycling games or getting inspiration.

Cons: this game requires internet connection, since the quiz is individual - it requires every student to have a cell-phone or a computer within reach. sometimes the internet is slow and it takes time until all the students have logged in to the game.

2. QR codes- What I mainly loved about this tool is that it is super easy to make and requires no internet whatsoever. For one of my communication lessons I taught my students the four important elements in radio broadcasts. The goal of the lesson was to practice radio broadcasting and we decided the theme would be the "school's kiosk". We created four stations and had the students rotate. One of the stations taught them all about investigations, that we needed to find resources with facts and statistics about the topic. I created QR codes to different articles they should look at instead of asking them to start from scratch. It was a grand success! The students loved it.

I think this tool's main advantage is that it doesn't require any access to the internet. You can create QR codes easily that will lead your students to different texts,videos and pictures. A very neat lesson I saw recently was a teacher who created a treasure hunt around the school with QR codes. In the website you can also find many templates and games teachers have created in the past.

More pros: This tool only requires one student to have a smartphone if you group them.

That's all for now,

Hope this was helpful.

Week 10 - Research Tools

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Hi everyone! 

It's been a while since I've last posted here, but I'm back and I've got some great new things to share!

So this week's focus is all about research tools you may find very helpful. 

I would first  like to admit that up until now I did all my research through Google and even after trying out different research tools and websites, I still think it's the ultimate tool to use. Many of the things other resource websites have to offer are brought up on Google search results anyways, like Wikipedia references, which is why I find it the most helpful. Nevertheless, Google always has about 100000000000 results for just about everything we search for and sometimes the 20 most popular results aren't always what we're looking for.

Alright, let's get practical!

First site is noodletools. I'll just start off by saying that I love how this website is organized (seriously, take a look). This tool is really good if you're looking for something specific. They will tell you where is the best place to search. I found a few really cool things there that I wouldn't necessarily know about if not for them. 

For example: Did you know that there is an entire website just for sound effects and music samples? 

Check out findsounds. The different sounds you'll find there may be a nice addition to your Power-Point presentations  or videos.

Another cool thing I found out about researching in general is that you can actually narrow your search by requesting results that have only been updated in the last 24 hours/week/month etc.

Wikipedia - I'm sure everyone that's reading this  is familiar with the website. BUT, what many people don't know is that Wikipedia has a 'simple English' version. I present to you Simple Wikipedia. I think this is great for teacher's usage when they want to bring a simplified encyclopedia text into the classroom without having to paraphrase or delete every other word in advance. This tool can also be introduced to lower grade students that are asked to do a research project on just about anything.

I would like to end with one more tool that Google has to offer (It's really just to emphasize how grateful I am for Google in general): Google Scholar is a fantastic website for college students. Easily search through different academic articles, books, publishers etc.  Pretty neat right?

Enjoy!