Embark on a transformative journey into the world of gamification in education. In this session, discover how teachers can harness the power of AI and Google Looker Studio to gamify their teaching, engaging students and fostering a dynamic learning environment. Explore real-world examples, practical strategies, and hands-on demonstrations to bring the excitement of gaming into your classroom.
In this 50-minute session, educators will delve into the art and science of gamifying their classrooms. We will explore the intersection of AI and Google Looker Studio, uncovering innovative ways to create immersive and educational gaming experiences. From personalized learning paths to AI-driven feedback, this session will provide actionable insights and practical steps for teachers to implement gamification strategies effectively.
Learning Objectives:
Understand the concept of gamification in education and its potential impact on student engagement.
Explore the capabilities of AI and Google Looker Studio in creating personalized and interactive learning experiences.
Learn practical strategies for implementing gamification in various subjects and grade levels.
Discover real-world examples of successful gamified classrooms using AI and Google Looker Studio.
Gain hands-on experience in creating gamified elements for a sample lesson.
We experienced some technical difficulties during our presentation, so Dr. Hollinger was kind enough to create a Google Looker Tutorial, which you can access on ScreenPal. Thanks to all who attended!
I have been researching the use of ebooks, digital media, mobile devices and the development of transliteracy skills in the design of high-quality language and literacy-rich environments for over a decade. One thing I have started to notice recently is that many of digital reading platforms I have looked at in the past are offering free subscriptions for the remainder of the school year. This is an awesome opportunity for teachers to expand their classroom libraries to include digital formats!
Currently, all of these platforms are offering free digital resources for the remainder of the school year.
When creating timeline or sequencing activities related to a text, mix up the events/items on a GSheet template, ask students to research them, explain them, label them, and then use the SORT SHEET A-Z feature to place them in chronological order.
Well into week 2 of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was looking for another GDocs template-like idea I could build to share with my students on my *newish L🎙ve from the Basement class livestream on Twitch.tv. The last graphic organizer activity went over as well as it could with a bunch of 20-something college students, so I figured why not give it another go?
One web-based tool I have been using for for a year or more is Sutori. I love this site! This is a great site for creating interactive timelines and stories. The interface is clean, it is easy to build a timeline-based story, and it easily integrates a number of digital media types. There is a free version and a paid version. As we see in many of these tools, there are quite a few enhanced features that are not available in the free version, but we soldier on and hope for a day when all web tools are free for educational purposes!
I had recently suggested Sutori to a buddy who I taught with back in my Green Local School days. He explained to me that he was teaching his son about the different types of Air Jordans and they were looking at when each style was released. I jokingly said, “you should have him build a timeline with Sutori,” but here we are…
Today we are going to stick with the formative assessment theme, although by the end of it all we are going to have some summative assessment vibes too.
In this specific instance, I want students to read about the COVID-19 crisis in Italy in order to gain a little insight into what they (we) may experience in the United States as the weeks progress. I started by locating a free article on Newsela.com to anchor my assignment with. I love Newsela because not only does it have a huge library of expository texts, it also provides these texts at different reading levels.
Lisa A. Lenhart, Kathleen A. Roskos, Jeremy Brueck & Xin Liang
Increasing young children’s vocabulary remains one of the most challenging areas of early literacy instruction. Progress has been made in identifying techniques that, while often complex, work to implement routinely. This study examines the effects of an easy-to-implement technique, say-tell-do-play (STDP), that integrates proven “active ingredients” of direct instruction embedded in shared book reading and structured play on preschoolers’ word awareness and word meaning. Effectiveness of the technique was tested with 18 preschoolers enrolled in a university-based child care setting. Children were pretested on vocabulary selected from two topic studies spanning 8 weeks. In the first period, half were instructed using the technique with play and the other half without play. Midstudy, they were tested, and the play feature was swapped for the second period. Children were then posttested and tested again after 2 months. Results indicate implementing the technique with play made a difference in children’s word awareness (recognition), but not for children’s understandings of word meanings. The study corroborates research that shows the benefits of intentional, direct instruction for helping children learn new words.
Lisa A. Lenhart, Kathleen A. Roskos, Jeremy Brueck & Xin Liang(2019)Does Play Help Children Learn Words?: Analysis of a Book Play Approach Using an Adapted Alternating Treatments Design,Journal of Research in Childhood Education,33:2,290-306,DOI: 10.1080/02568543.2019.1577776
If you take a walk through your local Best Buy or Home Depot, after just a few minutes browsing you will notice a variety of smart devices available to consumers at a relatively low cost. For example, a 32-inch Smart HDTV can be purchased for around $150. These smart devices are enabled with Wi-Fi access and many of them preloaded with a variety of streaming media applications that consumers can log into and begin viewing upon unpacking the device. Not even appliances are immune to the smart device revolution. Many refrigerators are being built with touchscreens on the doors and with network connectivity. Soon, we may be watching “television” from our refrigerator while we are preparing dinner.
As a result of the smart device revolution, today’s youth have left live television behind. Media consumption has shifted from television to digital streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and others. Children are consuming media via device, whether it is music via Spotify, Pandora, Soundcloud, Tidal and others or video via the iTunes Store, WatchESPN, Netflix or Amazon Prime. As such, digital reading platforms have begun to emerge to take advantage of the connected child. Tech-savvy parents and teachers can provide children and students with anytime-anyplace access to thousands of age-appropriate titles, which in the near future, could be accessed by toddlers from a touch-screen on the refrigerator door.
What does this mean in the world of the young child? What does it mean for children that are learning to read and interact with a variety of forms of literacy materials? Gone are the days of sitting your child on the kitchen floor with building blocks or storybook. Instead, they are plugged into the matrix and have connections to any number of streaming media platforms. How will children interact with literacy in the environment of the smart home? What does this mean for teaching kids the alphabet or their numbers? How does this impact the way that we can teach kids how to read, write, communicate and be literate in this streaming world? Do we need to have different expectations for what it means to be literate in our world today? Are expected expectations for student achievement relevant and attainable in this new age that we’re living in? Questions such as these must be considered to ensure that teachers are educating youth for the world they will live in tomorrow.
The Common Core State Standards emphasize the need to “prepare all students for success in college, career, and life.” In today’s workplace, that means communicating across a variety of platforms. Jobs are no longer location-based, with all members of the workforce in the same building at the same time. Instead, a number of digital tools, such as email, voice-over-Internet calling and web-conferencing software help colleagues connect across space and time. These tools can be put to effective use in the classroom too!
One way to share the love of reading with others is through video conferencing. Teachers can begin to build the transliteracy skills students need to connect and collaborate with digital tools using a free resource like Google Hangouts. Hangouts is a powerful tool that offers an opportunity to introduce a wider world to your students by connecting with classes in another state or country. Read the rest of this entry…
To develop a comprehensive vocabulary, students must build connections between words and cultivate sophisticated schemas of meaning. Teachers can use graphic organizers as a tool to help students visualize the interconnection between words to support this process. In the transliterate classroom, one way students can create powerful graphic organizers to support vocabulary growth is through the use of word clouds.
A word cloud is a compilation of words associated to a distinct idea that has been appropriated from a narrative or informational text on the topic. The words in the cloud often vary in print size and color. The more frequently a word is found in the text, the larger it appears in the cloud. A quick look at the cloud can help students preview a text passage, introduce key terms, and strengthen vocabulary.
Teachers and students can create word clouds using a number of free websites, most of which work in a similar manner. ABCYa! Word Clouds is a great place to get started with early elementary students. Begin by finding a passage of grade-level appropriate text online that you plan on having students read. Students can then type or paste the text into the word box, press the create button and view the word cloud. After generating the word cloud, students can change the color, layout and font of the words through an easy-to-use interface. ABCYa! Word Clouds can be saved or printed for later reference.
When teachers model the creation of word clouds using ABCYa! Word Clouds or a similar web application, they are not only offering opportunities to strengthen vocabulary, but also exposing students to critical transliteracy skills such as highlight, copy, paste and “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) editing. Teachers should be teaching the vocabulary associated with these technological tasks alongside academic vocabulary contained in the text.
The outcome of this conference was to build a better understanding of the state of the evidence and a develop a new section of the Encyclopedia on Early Childhood Development that will be useful for families, professionals and policy makers.
The Encyclopedia on Early Childhood Development is produced by the Centre of Excellence for Early Childhood Development (CEECD) and the Strategic Knowledge Cluster on Early Child Development (SKC-ECD). Respectively based at the Université de Montréal and Université Laval (Quebec, Canada), these two organizations have built over the years a solid network of international experts who gather, synthesize and comment, in their respective domain of expertise, the most up-to-date scientific knowledge available on the development of young children, from conception to age five.
Recently, the Technology in early childhood education section of the Encyclopedia was published. Dr. Roskos and I contributed a piece titled Teaching Early Literacy with E-books: Emerging Practices. I hope it helps shed some light around what we know and what we don’t know about teaching with ebooks.
What makes a good, workable, instructive, enjoyable ebook for young children? Certainly the established criteria of quality children’s literature apply to ebook texts. Strong features of good storybooks over the ages are similarly the features of enduring ebooks into the future: age-appropriate material that interests children, strong plots, and rich characterizations of the human condition are most likely the types of features we’d hope to find in a high-quality ebook. In this way, ebooks are very much like traditional books, and their literary or informational content can be judged by the same general criteria.
However, the addition of electronics impacts reading in new ways. An ebook, for example, can have background music whereas a traditional book cannot. Ebooks can provide mini-tutorials in hotspots, hyperlinks and virtual assistants who instruct and explain on-the-spot, in essence, ‘teaching’ children early literacy skills, such as phonological awareness and vocabulary. Read the rest of this entry…
