APP of the WEEK: Prodigy Math Game

Prodigy is a game that I have been using with my own kids for about a year now and I have been super pleased with, but up until now it has only been accessible through the website.  Prodigy has now come out with an App for the iPad that works both online and off, which is a huge bonus.  

The game itself has the student create an avatar and traverse a magical land, meeting different guides who give them various tasks to complete.  During these adventures, the students have to complete math problems to battle the creatures they encounter.  

As a teacher I can set up my class view their progress and any areas of difficulty.  I can assign "homework" for my students to "complete".  What's great about this is that the students don't even realize that they are doing an assignment.  The math content that I assign, say "addition of three digit numbers with carrying over", is woven directly into the game.  Once they have completed the specific math problems assigned Prodigy gives them problems from other areas of math at their level.  

They game is very engaging and kids, as far as I've seen, play much more after their assigned "homework".

APP of the Week: Wonder Box

http://www.wonderbox.io/

What I love about this app is the basis on the design/creative process.  When kids start a project they first are provided with a wealth of resources from which they can develop their ideas.  My four year old daughter was working on the project of drawing a butterfly and was given all of these resources for inspiration.

As can be seen some of the inspiration comes in the form of actual photos, some of other student's drawings, and some instructional videos.  After watching the videos and looking at the pictures, gathering ideas, she moved to the creation stage and made this.

She even added my wife's name Elizabeth (Lzbf).  

From the creation stage she went on to "publish", by sending me the photo of her work along with all of the process leading up to her creation.  

There are loads of projects found within the app, like "make a penguin talk" where they learn about Antartica and penguins lives then report what they learned through recording their voice and inserting it as the penguin speaking.  More projects come through daily with links to articles to pique kids interest in newsfeed like way.

(Yes, it is an interesting place to put the mouth)

Totally Inspired by Students Today: Minecraft for Reading Comprehension

Yesterday I was completely blown away by the students in PYP 8.  I introduced the project that I am doing for my Masters research using Minecraft to recreate the settings and retell the story of the book they have just completed as a class, and they by far over took my expectations.  Every student, even the ones that forgot their device, was thoroughly engaged in their work.  The ones who didn't have Minecraft to be building on were going through the book looking for details that the others in their group could then build.
The amount and quality of communication within the groups was excellent.  I heard one girl say to the other, "Don't make the road perfect, it was a really rough road."  All I did was explain to them what the project goal was and put them into mixed Minecraft ability groups and away they went. There was no need for anymore instruction.  They were engaged.

The book they have read is called Journey to Jo'Burg: A South African Story.  Immediately after I set them off onto Minecraft, one of the boys got on Google and searched for images of Johannesburg so that he knew what to build.  He found a picture of a distinctive tower and set out creating it.  Even if their reading comprehension does not show any statistically significant growth, the amount of other skills and contextual understanding that they are intuitively gathering is clearly beneficial.

Get Out of Their Way and Let Them Be Awesome

I had the opportunity to see Scott McLeod and the Innovate Conference at the Graded School last May. In his presentation there he talks about the Trudacot system that he and some colleagues have come up with that helps teachers analyze lesson plans, basically, to see if they are using technology for technology's sake or if the use of technology is enriching the learning and deepening thought. After the conference I was checking out what else Scott has done/is doing and came across his TEDx talk.
To me, he hits the nail on the head.  "We do everything we can to get tech into the hands of our kids and then we do everything we can to prevent them from using it."  The filters we put on are the equivalent of all of the over protective playground rules we now have.  No climbing the trees, they might fall.  No wood chips under equipment they might throw them.  Everything must be sterilized. This deprives them of be self motivated risk-takers.
The fear is what we need to block.  When we blanketly block students from access, flashing "ACCESS DENIED" signs, we are telling them that they cannot be trusted.

We need to EMPOWER them to find out how they can use the internet to express themselves and their ideas.

Online Responsibility and Nearpod

If you haven't checked out Nearpod yet have a look at this presentation I made about online responsibility.  I've been using Nearpod with my MYP 1 students in Design and they love it.  It's great being able to bring the presentation right to their hands and have them interact with it.  I definitely feel like I get more participation and engagement from my students when I use Nearpod.  I particularly enjoy seeing the responses from those students who have great ideas, but are reluctant to raise their hand.

Yours,


The Resourcerer

Ending the Year with Blogging

In PYP 7 the last Unit Of Inquiry for the school year is Communicating Through Technology.  What a great unit! (no bias here)  Together with the year group teachers we decided to let the communicate openly with only a slight bit of focusing by us.  I came into the classes and gave them an introduction to Blogs.  We looked at some inspiring blogs created by other kids about the same age as them and then gave them the task of creating a group blog about their interests.  Not a class blog with pictures of the work they had done and upcoming parent meeting times, but a class blog that communicates who they are.  We gathered ideas about broader interests that they might share so that the kids could group themselves together, however they also all have more than one interest and we allowed them to be in more than one group.  Then, we let them go at it.

Within a couple of days each of the class blogs had upwards of thirty posts.  The kids were thoroughly engaged (and still are) as it gave them a platform for them to express their authentic voice.  We could have gone through and made each student hand in a rough draft, edits, and a final perfected version before publishing, but that wasn't the objective of our unit, and it probably would have killed most if not all motivation.  I had one student who went home over the weekend and wrote five posts tracking the FIFA scandal.  The posts were so well written that I assumed he had just copied them from another source, but after checking I found it to be his own work.  When I talked to his teacher about the writing he had done she told me that he never does his homework, when he is asked to do writing in school he gives little effort even though we all know that he a bright student. He has found his authentic voice.

There were students who, yes, completely copied information they found on another website, put into the blog and called it theirs.  I was hoping that these things would come up because it provided the opportunity to teach in a situation that is real.  I came into the class and together we looked at how we could rewrite the post so that it was the students own work.  There were many students who after seeing the post that I pointed out that had copied, went back into their own posts and changed them to be their own words.  They were asking great questions like "what if I write someones birthdate or where they were born that I found on another webpage, is that plagiarism?" "How do I write it if it was exactly what someone said?"  They are not being told what plagiarism or intellectual property is, they are inquiring about it and finding out for themselves.

http://pyp7-22ideas.blogspot.com.br/
http://pyp7omega.blogspot.com.br/
http://thebestblogpyp7.blogspot.com.br/

"In the future we won't need teachers because Tech will replace them"

I've been thinking about how to respond to this statement for sometime now.  I hear it often, sometimes jokingly, but more than not a real fear that teachers will become obsolete is a hidden wall in progressive educational thought and if we're not careful it will lead to denying children access to technology.

To those who make this statement, I came across my counter argument in a quote by Sir Ken Robinson.

"They saw in me something I did not see in myself."
An algorithm can not do that.  An algorithm can not interpret the look on a child's face when a teacher recognizes their talent.  A personalized curriculum, like Kahn Academy, knows where you should go next in your learning progression, but it can not tell when to push you or when to back off and lend a consoling word.  It is personalized not personal.

We need to recognize that technology provides the tools to give us as teachers more time and information to provide the "personal" to the students.