SRS Showdown: Quizizz, Socrative, and GoSoapBox

The SRS competition was actually a really fun day. In it, we were able to compete against our fellow classmates, working to state that our tool was the best. This competition taught me a lot about the various tools that we can use in a classroom as study and review tools. It showed me many more options than I knew previously existed, so it was really fun learning with my group and my class about the many different ways we as educators can make reviewing fun for our students.

My group presented on Quizizz, a program that creates quizzes in the form of an online game. In this tool, like many others, you are able to sign in, make your own questions for a personalized quiz, and control who joins the quiz due to an access code. You can use a number of formats and templates that have already been made for you, or you can form your own quiz. Each question is divided up nicely and you are able to insert pictures into your questions as well. With this level of customization and flexibility, it is easy for a teacher to put a lot of questions on a given quiz. Another awesome feature is the fact that students can go at their own pace, yet still feel like they all have an equal chance of winning. It allows for the “game” part of the review to be fun and fair. At the end, you can view the leaderboard, assess grades, and see which questions were the hardest for each student, either individually or collectively. You can also download a spreadsheet of all types of facts concerning problems and participants. You can also email parents with any concerns that you might have if the child is not doing well on any of the activities.

One of the other presentations was on the tool Socrative. This tool was very similar to Quizizz in that you can design review quizzes quickly and easily. One unique and exciting feature of this tool is that there is a “race” function in which you can divide the class into teams and they can compete against each other to see who answers the most questions the fastest. This is an effective way to possibly make kids want to learn their materials better and to be able to win the competition if they understand more. This could be an incentive to some of them. On the flip side, it could also make other kids feel bad if they do not win the competition, so using it in a younger classroom may not be the best idea if they get too competitive. Another shortcoming of this tool is that it does not give as many precise results. Overall, it was an enjoyable tool to use.

One last tool that I enjoyed using was called GoSoapBox. The strengths of this site showed immediately. Once we entered the code for the “classroom”, we were directed into a menu that contained all the activities that the teacher had made for us.  Once on the menu, we could do a number of things. We could follow the teachers instructions and go through quizzes that were previously set up. We could take part in a poll. We could ask questions in a section near the bottom of the menu and add comments to other people’s questions if we had the answer. Another great part of this tool was that people could tell the teacher anonymously if they were confused using an option at the top of the menu. This tool is extremely helpful in that a teacher could see that and halt the progression of the class whenever there were people who needed to catch up. One shortcoming of this tool was that there was no filter. Kids could comment whatever they wanted in certain sections and the monitoring of that would take more effort than would be able to be given.

As a whole, this presentation showed me a lot of new and fun options for us as teachers to use in our classrooms someday. Many of these tools have parts that are very similar, but each has their own specialty. Since there are so many good tools to use, a teacher can add variety, fun, and learning to their lessons and classrooms. 

Twitter Blog Post #2

Yet again, the world of social media impresses me. Before this semester, I had no idea that so many educators use Twitter for spreading ideas, plans, and activities for other teachers to use and learn from. This way of looking at it makes it a great tool for educators, that they are able to learn from the good experiences and the tough ones from their peers. It can be a useful tool if you allow it to be.

            One area that I found particularly good from Twitter was being able to observe what my classmates were up to on their accounts. Seeing their opinions and ideas was a great experience for me and something I enjoyed a lot. I was able to see how they worked with the material that I was going through at the same time. For example, I was able to view my classmates’ opinions on projects like the Flip Project or the Smartboard Class Presentation. Some of them posted links to their videos or show pictures from their experiences. This was an area I appreciated a ton, that I was able to see what other people in my class did and appreciate their work.

            Another area I loved of this kind was the joy I could experience with my classmates through their posts concerning what they were working on. I saw the joy that people had towards formatting their own classes or organizing their projects to teach “students”. So many of us were able to share our excitement for teaching other people, and I too found this to be exciting. Being able to relate to and share the joys that I and others had in teaching other people. It was a great experience to do these projects and then look around and see other people excited about them too.

            All in all, the experiences on Twitter were what Twitter is supposed to be for educators: connection, appreciating and learning. I learned about different ideas and opinions, looking at how they each affected how a person taught and interacted with students and teaching. I focused in at appreciating my classmates’ work. I was able to appreciate how they did their assignments and how hard they worked at them. They shared a piece of themselves in how they did their projects. Lastly, I was able to connect with my fellow future educators in how we did our assignments. We were able to appreciate and relate to each other in the similarities of what we did. 

Module 5-Flipped Classroom Project

Typically learning in school is seen as a classroom activity. A teacher will present information before a class, typically in a lecture setting, and the students are encouraged to take notes. It is given at the pace that the teacher decides and you have to keep up and react to that level. There is not really any varied pace or direct contact with every student, which hinders some kids’ learning. They need to work extra hard to get at what the teacher was saying because they were not able to get it the first time. They cannot rewind it and relearn it in the same moment. How can this be helped.

            Enter the Flipped-Classroom Project. While it is not possible nor practical to do this every time, it can be effective if used periodically. The Flipped-Classroom follows the format of teaching a concept online before a class and then testing the class on whether they learned the concept or not the next day. This can effectively allow students to focus on the material at their own pace. They can stop the lesson, look over it more in depth, process it well, and then move on. It can be effective at reaching different learning styles as well, given the flexible and adaptable nature of such a lesson.

For this project, I worked with a partner in my dear friend and colleague Jon Fossell. We developed our lesson by first creating a presentation on Smart Notebook. We focused on developing the presentation with many images and visuals that would draw in our class. We focused on putting only necessary words on the slides, avoiding “over wordage” so that the students could develop the ideas themselves. Next we used a program called Screencast-o-Matic to record over the presentation and work our way through the lesson step by step. This portion allowed us to effectively teach our concepts and develop them more than just our visuals would. This project forced us to not only pay attention to what a student might want to see, so as to draw them in, and to what the student needed to hear or consider to fully grasp the concept.

Overall, this project was a creative way that we were able to educate other people. We were able to both formulate a project and present it easily and effectively. This type of project could be effective in reaching different types of learning styles, as well as allow in depth and self-paced learning. Along with that, this format of presentation could also be a way that students could do a project in which they teach the rest of the class on a certain topic. Overall, this was an effective tool to use.