GameUp with BrainPop

Seventy-four percent of K-8 teachers in a recent survey by the Games and Learning Publishing Council reported using digital games for instruction. Gaming can definitely enrich your classroom and further enhance student learning. One great gaming tool is GameUp. 

GameUp is a FREE resource through BrainPop that provides fun, interactive and educational games that will engage and challenge your students. GameUp addresses a wide variety of K-12 content areas, including: Science, Math, Social Studies, Health, English, and Engineering/Technology.

GameUp's Quality Learning Games:

- Motivate and provide goals

- Encourage participation

- Foster creative, interactive problem-solving

- Strengthen critical and systems thinking

- Pose adaptive challenges

- Spark inquiry

- Require very little prep by busy teachers

(View on Youtube)

What you need to know about GameUp:

- Search games by K-12 state standards as well as by lesson plans and grade level.

- Lesson plans, games, and quizzes/assessment tools are FREE.

- Students can also watch related BrainPop/Jr. videos if you are a BrainPop subscriber.

- Teachers can assign different game levels for differentiation.

Have you already used GameUp? What other ways are you gaming in your classroom? Let us know in the comments below.  

Resources
Digital Learning Games Used by Majority of Teachers, Survey Finds
Games and Learning Publishing Council
Jane McGonigal: Gaming Can Make a Better World!
Gamification in Education

Infuse Learning: A Virtual Student Response System

 I am excited to share with you InfuseLearning.  Move over Socrative, PollEverywhere, and other student response systems.  It just got easier.  InfuseLearning is the newest virtual tool for this job in the classroom.  It is empowering yet simple to use.  The online tool allows you to push questions, pictures, prompts, and quizzes to each student device.  School districts that are lucky enough to have classroom sets of mobile devices, laptops, or have a successful BYOD program set up are able to use this tool easily.  It provides a platform that allows teachers to engage every student on any device. It is not limited by location or device.  Real-time student feedback, enhanced interest, differentiation, and effective questioning are all part of this tool.

• Quick Assessment, sometimes called on- the- fly questioning, can come in the form of Draw Response, True/False, Multiple Choice, Sort in Order, Open Ended Text Answer, Numeric, and Likert Scale.
• The ability to send a weblink or a math problem to every student device is part of the Interactive tools.
• Quizzes can be created ahead of time and then pushed to the student devices.
• Quiz Results can be downloaded to a spreadsheet and saved.
• The teacher has the ability to see each student response, including how they solved the problem you pushed to them.

Teachers go to:   http://www.infuselearning.com/ to register for free.

Teachers go to:   http://teacher.infuselearning.com/ to set up quizzes and receive your student room number.

Students go to:  http://student.infuselearning.com/ and wait for quizzes and questions to be pushed down to them.

 

One side note:  It must be used with browsers other than Internet Explorer.  You can use Chrome or Firefox with no problem.  You will get an error with IE.

 

 

 

Makeover Your Lesson Using ThingLink

Problem: You’ve taught the same lesson for the past five years. How do you make it better?

Solution: ThingLink, of course! It’s FREE and it’s easy.

ThingLink is a digital tool that allows you to turn any image into an interactive graphic. You can create multiple hot spots on specific parts of an image and turn that image into a multimedia launch pad.

Imagine this. Your lesson is on volcanoes. You have a short video clip on lava landscapes, a web site that depicts the volcanoes in the Pacific Ocean, and a cross section that shows the basic components of a volcano. You also have a graphic organizer on volcanic vocabulary that students will use in their groups.

Here’s how easy it is to create a ThingLink. First, you upload an image. Next, you link your content to the image. It really is that simple. (You do have to create an account but it’s free for educators.)

ThingLink is a tool that is suitable for all classrooms. To learn more, click here. If you have comments or questions about using ThingLink or other digital tools, we’d love to hear from you. Post a comment or send us an email.

Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, and Something Blue

The availability of quality instructional technology resources and devices is growing exponentially.  Who can possibly keep up? While the bells and whistles of  so many new resources may seem appealing, we should take care to evaluate their usefulness in the curriculum before jumping on the band wagon and abandoning tried and true resources that have been available for some time. That said, here are four resources for your consideration this week.

Something Old

ReadWritethink.org has been around for a long time.  The site contains a wealth of information and activities for teachers and students including lesson plans and student interactives that are categorized by grade level, type, learning objectives and more.  In the past, though the interactives were all great tools, the lack of ability to save work in progress was a downfall which ReadWriteThink is now addressing.  There are currently 15 interactives with the ability for student work to be saved.  The following video explains how to do this:

Some of my favorite interactives from the site are:
Cube Creator  which can be used to create a biography cube, mystery cube, story cube or other student created cube.
Compare and Contrast Map  that can be used in any subject area across all grade levels from 3-12.
Letter Generator  which students can use to learn to write friendly and business letters.
Trading Card Creator  for science and social studies
Puzzle Me Words that reinforces letter sounds for K-1 students.

Something New

The Swivl  is a great new device to help you create videos with an iPhone, iPod or iPad mini and without a cameraman.  Enhance your lessons with videos of your own demonstrations or record just about any lesson you might want students to watch in your flipped classroom. The video and audio are recorded wirelessly.

Something Borrowed

Gooru is a website and app consisting of a well-organized collection of multimedia math, science and social studies resources suitable for students in grades 5-12. Find out more about this resource at http://gcisdleadwithtechnology.blogspot.com/2013/03/gooru-search-engine-for-learning.html

Something Blue

When you want to quickly share a file without having to log into a cloud account such as Dropbox or Google, Pastelink is about as easy as it gets.  All you do is go to http://pastelink.me/, drag and drop a file to the center of the page then copy the short URL that is created instantly. The copied link can then be pasted anywhere for others to access within 7 days.
The site is free, has no advertisements and there is nothing to install.  You can share files up to 250 mb without logging in, but if you want to share images, videos, or other larger files up to 2 Gb, you will need to create an account.  It’s still free.

What's in Your Toolkit?

Triptico is a great resource to use with the Promethean board. It’s FREE and contains about 20 different interactive tools. Some of the tools include: word magnets, timers, board games, and group generators. You can download it here and explore the variety of resources using the scroll bar at the bottom of the window.

 

 

 

 

 

Fabulous Flipchart Resources

Are you getting a new Promethean board this summer? Or, maybe you have a board and you are ready to learn some new tricks? Check out these fabulous resources and please post a comment if you have some favorites of your own. We’d love to hear from you!

iTunes- Subscribe to the ActivTips in iTunes. As of today, there are 132 tips on a variety of topics ranging from the magic revealer to embedding videos.
http://tinyurl.com/43ejqfl

Google's Custom Search- Use a custom search engine to find flipcharts faster.
http://tinyurl.com/4gawbeh

FCPS- Reference these great tutorials, resources, and quick tips. This is a very comprehensive site!
http://sites.fcps.org/trt/promethean_activinspire

Interactive Sites- Explore these interactive web sites… and if you need a quick sponge activity for your kids, check out Bubble Burst!http://sites.google.com/site/trainprocomputing/home/interactive-sites

Activclassroom Academy- Learn to build a better flipchart and create self-paced activities using these handouts.
http://tinyurl.com/3lhbp9g


Tip of the Week: Keyboard Shortcuts for ActivInspire
F2 Design Mode
F5 Full Screen
F7 Spellcheck Flipchart


Web Resource: 10 minute mail
So you’ve found a great site and you want to create an account. But an email address is required! Use this site to get a temporary email address instead of junking up your inbox!
http://10minutemail.com/10MinuteMail/index.html

Simple Video Tips

Want to use a YouTube video in your classroom but the website is blocked?  Copy the link of the video in the address box and paste it into http://www.zamzar.com/ . Follow the process and soon you will have the video downloaded.  Only want part of the YouTube video?  Use http://tubechop.com/  to easily chop a funny or interesting section from any YouTube video and share it.  Want to convert videos to a different format? A free converter like Oxelon Media can be downloaded and then used by simply right-clicking on the video.

Tip of the Week:   Flip Cameras or Sony Bloggies work well for videos and are easy to use for both the student and the teacher.  

Web Resources:  Some of the video sites I use include Discovery Streaming, Brain Pop, The Futureschannel, WatchKnow , Khan Academy, and Animoto