Wow! What a crazy few weeks it has been. I have been able to make zero progress on my "Summer Book Study" project, but I literally have not stopped working on many other projects.
Last week, June 20-22, I was a facilitator at Camp Infusing Technology in Charleston, WV, run by the WVCPD. There are around 70 educators at this conference eager to learn as much as they could about implementing technology in their classrooms.
I taught sessions on Office Mix, Infographics, Teacher Tools, Formative Assessment Games, and EdPuzzle/Zaption. I'll give a rundown of each of those here so that it's easy to see all of the amazing things teachers were able to learn about at this conference.
Office Mix is a plug-in in PowerPoint that allows you to turn your PowerPoint into a video with quiz questions and other interactive elements embedded in them. I haven't been able to use this with students yet, but it is an incredibly easy program to use. One of my participants says that he has used it in his classes, and his success story is amazing. He reported that an introductory PowerPoint that might have ordinarily taken him 2 class periods to get through (due to interruptions, etc) took the students just FIFTEEN MINUTES to complete outside of class. All he had to do was record himself going over the slides, embed some questions to check for understanding, and send it to the students. How great is that! I cannot wait to try this with students.
Infographics are those big ol' pictures you see all over the Internet with tons of facts and stats about different topics, presented in a pretty manner. While you might not think of these as a classroom tool, they definitely can be! They can be used to explain classroom rules or introduce a topic in a catchy way. Students can even use them to present information and show you what they know.
In my Teacher Tools session, we talked about ten different online teacher tools, all of which can be found on this Symbaloo - www.symbaloo.com/mix/teachertoolsitwv. After this session, my friend Kelley told me about a super cool app called Chwazi. With this app, students each place a finger on the device screen, and the app randomly highlights someone's finger to show who goes first, or to show who is one what team. Can't wait to try this one!
EdPuzzle and Zaption are INCREDIBLY COOL - well, it seems like Zaption is going out of business for a while, but EdPuzzle does the same thing. EdPuzzle allows you to take any video from YouTube and insert questions at any point. You can also record additional audio over the video or trim parts of it. You start a classroom, add students, and then assign videos for them. After they watch it and answer the questions, you'll get a report about how they did and even have the option to comment on their answers. I've used it once with my Upward Bound students to go over some preliminary concepts I didn't want to take class time to teach, and it was a super easy way to flip the classroom.
The workshop on Formative Assessment Games was pretty neat too. There are several major players in the arena for formative assessment with technology, but my co-presenter Amy and I went over Kahoot, Quizlet Live, Quizizz, and Flip Quiz. Each of these has something different to offer, but each is engaging for students of all levels. I've heard nothing but positive feedback from teachers who have tried these tools!
All in all, we had a super great week at this conference, and I'm sad I'll have to miss the next one. If you want to learn more about this conference or see what is going on, follow @InfusingTechWV on Twitter or search #itechwv.
Last week, June 20-22, I was a facilitator at Camp Infusing Technology in Charleston, WV, run by the WVCPD. There are around 70 educators at this conference eager to learn as much as they could about implementing technology in their classrooms.
I taught sessions on Office Mix, Infographics, Teacher Tools, Formative Assessment Games, and EdPuzzle/Zaption. I'll give a rundown of each of those here so that it's easy to see all of the amazing things teachers were able to learn about at this conference.
Office Mix is a plug-in in PowerPoint that allows you to turn your PowerPoint into a video with quiz questions and other interactive elements embedded in them. I haven't been able to use this with students yet, but it is an incredibly easy program to use. One of my participants says that he has used it in his classes, and his success story is amazing. He reported that an introductory PowerPoint that might have ordinarily taken him 2 class periods to get through (due to interruptions, etc) took the students just FIFTEEN MINUTES to complete outside of class. All he had to do was record himself going over the slides, embed some questions to check for understanding, and send it to the students. How great is that! I cannot wait to try this with students.
Infographics are those big ol' pictures you see all over the Internet with tons of facts and stats about different topics, presented in a pretty manner. While you might not think of these as a classroom tool, they definitely can be! They can be used to explain classroom rules or introduce a topic in a catchy way. Students can even use them to present information and show you what they know.
In my Teacher Tools session, we talked about ten different online teacher tools, all of which can be found on this Symbaloo - www.symbaloo.com/mix/teachertoolsitwv. After this session, my friend Kelley told me about a super cool app called Chwazi. With this app, students each place a finger on the device screen, and the app randomly highlights someone's finger to show who goes first, or to show who is one what team. Can't wait to try this one!
EdPuzzle and Zaption are INCREDIBLY COOL - well, it seems like Zaption is going out of business for a while, but EdPuzzle does the same thing. EdPuzzle allows you to take any video from YouTube and insert questions at any point. You can also record additional audio over the video or trim parts of it. You start a classroom, add students, and then assign videos for them. After they watch it and answer the questions, you'll get a report about how they did and even have the option to comment on their answers. I've used it once with my Upward Bound students to go over some preliminary concepts I didn't want to take class time to teach, and it was a super easy way to flip the classroom.
The workshop on Formative Assessment Games was pretty neat too. There are several major players in the arena for formative assessment with technology, but my co-presenter Amy and I went over Kahoot, Quizlet Live, Quizizz, and Flip Quiz. Each of these has something different to offer, but each is engaging for students of all levels. I've heard nothing but positive feedback from teachers who have tried these tools!
All in all, we had a super great week at this conference, and I'm sad I'll have to miss the next one. If you want to learn more about this conference or see what is going on, follow @InfusingTechWV on Twitter or search #itechwv.