Gamification and games-based learning seem to be key in today’s educational environment and have an important role to play in the classroom. Gamification is where customizable apps or programs are used in the classroom to enhance student learning. These are what I tend to use in my own classroom. The game-based learning games such as vocabulary.com or No Red Ink are content specific – I checked these out but since they are not in the target language I cannot really see any use for them in my classroom at this particular time. I am wondering if it’s possible to get vocabulary.com to work in another language. I tried it out with some French words, but so far it couldn’t recognize them and I couldn’t’ see a way of indicating that the word was not in English. Maybe that will change over time.
In my classroom we play some technology based games to engage students more in their learning. When learning new vocabulary I post vocabulary lists with either words or pictures (or both) to our class page in Quizlet. Then during class or at home students spend between 10-15 mins reviewing the vocabulary and playing the match-up game also. In the past I also used Quizlet Live whereby students work in teams and one student from each team has the correct answer to the question that has been asked of the group. I have not played this game recently with my freshman students as I found that sometimes one or two of them would logon twice, which meant that when the game opened up there was a team who had players missing. This became quite tedious in that you as a teacher you have to review everyone’s name on the list to see who really is in the game before assigning teams, so in the end I tended to avoid that. A tool that I recently started using is Quizizz, which I love, particularly because of the feedback it gives to students. Often I can find a Quiz on Quizizz that is based on a chapter of the book I am currently covering, so I duplicate it and then adapt it according to student need. Once students have played with the vocabulary on Quizlet we switch over to using this tool. I can ask students to log in and so see their progress and as an educator you can know who or who isn’t in the game. Once students have gone through all of the questions we then review those answers that were most incorrect in class. On their own screens students can also see what answers that they got wrong together with the correct answer which is great. We then use Quizizz again and generally the class results will improve by at least 10% on the 2nd play. Another app I enjoy is kahoot. I use this when we review a chapter before a major Quiz. I write questions which include vocabulary and grammar questions. The students enjoy playing this game, although I probably use it quite a bit less than the Quizlet or Quizizz. It doesn’t have the feedback possibilities that Quizizz does and often it is not easy to find kahoots that cover the material that my students have been learning, so I pretty much write each one from scratch. These three games have their positive points and their drawbacks, but on the whole students are certainly more engaged when they are being used in class, and when surveyed as part of my research last semester, students certainly felt that Quizlet did help them learn new vocabulary more readily. On a personal note, I would love it if Fortnite became available in either French or Spanish, so that students could just hear the instructions in the target language and become familiar with them. Most of my students love playing this game, and so it could be a huge draw.
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This week was my favorite week of the course so far I think – getting to experiment with those suggested apps was really interesting! I checked out several apps including Imovie, Screencastify, Vocaroo, Soundation, Audacity, Edpuzzle & Powtoon. I decided to look at Imovie because my students make videos of themselves doing roleplays or skits which they share with the class. I liked this app as it had great editing abilities so that the students could eliminate or change parts before uploading. This gave them more flexibility than other apps such as flipgrid, but you can’t set up a class page/area, students just have to upload the link. I tried out Screencastify, which did the job that it was intended to do, but I didn’t find it as easy to use as Screen-cast-o-matic. I didn’t seem to be able to crop the area on the screen to record and so had to go to full screen, but then I couldn’t pause it as it was running. (Could just be my user- error though). I liked the fact that it saved to Google drive, that makes life so much easier when trying to find a document and having it there at your fingertips as opposed to logging onto a third party’s website. Adobe Spark is better still I think for being able to import a graphic and then talk over the top of it and make it into a presentation. Their graphics are awesome. They do need to tweak the areas where you can add text though as that is quite limiting. I tried to find workarounds on the internet, but it said that this was something their teams were still working on. I would like to be able to put text where I like on an adobe spark page as opposed to just being limited to adding a caption, or title and text.
I tried out three of the voice apps, but none of them totally addressed my needs. Vocaroo was a really simple voice app for recording your voice, which my students could definitely use for recording themselves, but it was very basic and just allowed you to record without editing. You could then just upload the link onto our schoology, by cutting and pasting. The other two apps Soundation and Audacity looked interesting, but they were way more complex and more for musicians who are making music. In my classes I’m looking for a simple app that students can record their voices, edit it and then upload directly to schoology, via a link, or the ability to save in google drive would be great. I did look in the app store too, but didn’t find anything that met this criteria. The other apps I checked out were EdPuzzle and Powtoon. I could definitely use Edpuzzle to upload a You Tube video, or probably more likely a screencast that I had made and then add some simple basic questions for understanding. This seemed like a really useful app to use for the flipped classroom whereby students would be doing this activity at home or at a station in a classroom. The final app that I looked at was Powtoon. This app looked great for someone who is trying to advertise something, or use lots of graphics, but personally I felt that in my language classes it would be difficult to use this a lot of these as many of the graphics had English phrases attached to them. The pages just looked very busy to me, and it did put me off from trying to use it. I really much prefer the simplicity of Adobe Spark with simple graphics , but I can see where Powtoon could be great for other classes such as English or Journalism. The use of apps can greatly enhance my classroom teacher. Imovie will be great for my students to use to upload their skits and roleplays, with the ability to edit and then upload to Schoology. Students could use Screencast-o-Matic or Adobe Spark to prerecord presentations about cultural topics of their choice which they can upload to Schoology via a link, and then I can show these to the rest of the class, so they get to experience each other’s findings. I would certainly try using Vocaroo in my classes, but I am still on the lookout for something which has editing possibilities, but is simple to use and is just for the voice, which students could upload as a link to schoology or save on their google drive. EdPuzzle will something I will definitely use for informational purposes for my students so that they can answer questions about what they have watched. This would be good to use for student understanding, but could also be used as an assessment tool as well to see how much students have understood. I like the fact that this app is so compact and that the questions and video can be incorporated together as opposed to watching the video and then opening up a separate document to type up the answers. The articles we read this week were really interesting. The key points focused on having the students watch screencasts/videos independently so that they can see them at their own pace and answer questions. I have already done this a small amount with my students, but I just asked them to take notes, and only a small number of them turned in the assignment. The article by Jon Bergman mentioned using EduCanon, which apparently can tell you who has watched the video, which I thought would be interesting to look at, but I haven’t managed to do that yet. Other articles were suggesting doing the flip in class so that students can watch a video at a station and then answer questions; this last week I asked how many of my students have their own headphones and most had – so I think this would be a definite possibility for my class, although they don’t always bring their headphones with them. My classroom is quite small, but I would like students to try and work in small groups in different areas, so that I could get to them more and become much more of a facilitator rather than standing and teaching from the front. When I was on my teaching practice over 20 years ago, the Chair of my Department actually used this strategy of introducing the topic and then having the students work on a list of listening, reading, writing and speaking assignments, at their own pace, choosing which they did first over a period of several weeks. It was very successful but very different to what anyone else was doing at that time. It’s so interesting to me to learn now what a difference this can make to student learning and kudos for her for implementing this method! |
AuthorI am a French & Spanish teacher at Justin-Siena High School wanting to get new ideas to motivate my students. ArchivesCategories |