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The Grand Finale

Alright so maybe it's not *the* grand finale, but a small finale certainly. This reflection culminates a long semester of gamification, best practices, research and reading, designing, shining, and above all, blogging. So here are my top 5 stand-outs from it all, from big proclamations to tiny tidbits that are now recorded for posterity! If you are thinking of a video or presentation that you want to share with your students, someone has probably already made it.  BUT, it might not be free, it may not have the exact detail/ vocabulary/ tone that you need, and it will be wayyyy too long. Enter, video editing programs like Edpuzzle that let you crop and add questions or notes to videos from YouTube. I definitely plan to try for more of a flipped classroom approach to some of my lesson plans, and use Edpuzzle to make sure students watch and understand the video before class, using videos from all over the internet so that I don't have to create each from scratch. And if I can'...
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Game On!

  Games in the classroom are possibly the fastest route to becoming teacher of the year! I have yet to meet a person who doesn't like games, and definitely have not encountered a student who would rather make flash cards than play a vocabulary review game. This week, it's all about the games- different styles, formats, and interactive scenarios to make our content more fun! Game-Based Learning Game-based learning is the specific use of games to achieve educational outcomes  (Bohyun, 2015) . This is one of the easiest ways to incorporate games into a pre-made lesson or unit. Games have been shown to have powerful effects on the brain, and can help motivate students to keep trying until they can "beat" that challenge (Hanson-Smith, 2016), so let's apply that to some otherwise boring test review. For ninth graders, socializing and games are the best things they could hope to do in school. And more now than ever, many schools are ensuring that each student has a compu...
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The Gift of Presence in Online Learning

 It's time for  presents  presence!  Specifically, the three types of "presences" we try to maintain in online learning: teaching, social, cognitive. Teaching Presence While it might seem obvious that a course needs a teacher, it also needs a clear sense that the instructor is there to direct and focus the class on the content, and maintain a safe and inclusive space (Garrison, 2007). A big part of this is starting the class on the right foot. Teachers need to establish ground rules, expectations, and goals for the course  (Maxwell & Shackelton, 2012). To demonstrate this, I decided to create a Bitmoji classroom .  At the moment, only the Netiquette box and my email actually link to the appropriate resource, but hopefully this gives you a sense of how it would look and function. Are you in love?  See the video below for more information on how to create your own! This virtual "classroom" is a great way to get students oriented to a course, or to u...
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A True Asynchronous Synchronicity

You might think the title of this post is purely for fun, but the tool I'm going to share with you came to my attention at an opportune moment when I was desperately trying to find tools that I could use in a particular class. At the time, I was not sure if I would be able to implement it in real-time (synchronously), or if I'd have to give students something they could work on even without me there (asynchronously). Such is life in a pandemic! Finding PearDecks and it's dual modes for instructor-paced and student-paced learning turned out to be  exactly  what I needed- a true synchronicity!  In this post, I want to give you a quick introduction to PearDecks, an awesome tool that I use for both synchronous and asynchronous learning.   In my school district, the first half of class is supposed to be synchronous, a time for "lecture," and the second half is asynchronous, for individual work time. ( Image available from   Cotron Online ) Why this tool? In my school...
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Lights, Camera, Audience!

I know that's not quite the saying, but today's post is all about putting the focus on the audience. When designing any course or training, an understanding of one's audience is a huge determinant in whether or not your program will be effective and successful. This can be particularly true for adult learners, who tend to have much broader experiences and interests that can be built on and captured if your course is designed with them in mind (Pappas, 2014).  For this post, I want to share something I created about a year ago in an attempt to understand my audience. I worked for an environmental non-profit, and we would take people on hikes to highlight work the organization was engaged in. Sometimes these hikes were quite long and challenging (we even planned some backpacking trips!), and we occasionally found our attendees ill prepared for the event. So, I decided to create a simple google form to help understand if the audience would be receptive to the...
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