Welcome to my Dojo… ClassDojo

Hello dear readers,

Today I will present you ClassDojo. ClassDojo is a classroom management system. This software can be used by teachers to give behavior feedback (positive and negative) to their students and to take attendance. The categories of feedbacks are fully customizable by the teacher. The feedback can also be shared with parents if desired. The parents simply have to create an account to join the group of their children after they have been invited.

ClassDojo is not only great for giving feedback and taking attendance, it has also some small tools that I appreciate really much. ClassDojo as a timer tool and a can select a student at random. I think it’s really useful. Yeah, I am into small details… Another thing that I like from ClassDojo is the design. Have you seen the characters!? They are so awesome!

Even if I think that ClassDojo seems like a great tool, it may not be really suited for high school. I mean you can try but… I really think it’s most suitable for elementary school.

According to an article by Judy Willis, keeping track of homework with tools such as ClassDojo or even a plain poster, make students aware of their achievement and able to clearly recognize their progress, which trigger a dopamine reward response in the students. This causes students to experience the reward from the release of dopamine, which prompt them to seek future opportunities to repeat the actions that led them to be successful. This is complicated way to say that it motivates them to work and every teacher knows that motivation is the key to students’ success.

As showed by Lisa Mims, ClassDojo has three main advantages.

• It improves behavior
• It shares data
• It saves you a lot of time.

I personally think that ClassDojo is a great tool to motivate students, but some people don’t agree with me. The author’s of www.teachingace.com/ point out the fact that the students’ points can be projected on to an interactive whiteboard, so students can actually see how they are being rated – judged – at any given time.  And all the other students can see everyone as well. She claims that public displays of student behavior is nothing more than public shaming. I agree to some degree to watch she wrote. Yes, it is public shaming if you really want it to be, but you can’t always defend bad behaviors. If by motivating 20 students, you make one aware that he is not behaving correctly, why not? He should probably be aware of it by now. It is sad for students suffering the ”public shaming”, but every students in the class should be aware about who are the students that don’t show good behaviors. I think that refusing to use such a great tool solely on the principle of wanting to hide the truth, is not the best choice.

Besides the pseudo public shaming aspect, ClassDojo is a really good tool overall for elementary school.

Edublogs

Dear readers,

Today I will present you, yet again, one of the newest tools I found on the magnificent internet. As you might have guessed by the title… it is called Edublogs. Edublogs is an online tool where teachers, students and educators can share information and stay connected with each others.

I would like to make a whole description of what Edublogs is, but I would be there for hours and I couldn’t make a better job than the following video. However, I will still try my best and make a short description of Edublogs.

Edublogs is the thing that will tie every ICT tools that you use in your classroom. Social media networks (Facebook,Twitter, etc.), video creations (YouTube, DailyMotion, etc.) and many other useful web tools are great to motivate your students, but sometimes, everything seems disconnected. Edublogs is there to solve this issue. It is the home on the web for learning and sharing. Edublogs put everything in a convenient and simple blog format. It really is the fusion of Education and blogs. Yeah, they chose a great name too.

Edublogs is not only a good tool to create blogs and to serve as a home for your tools, it also allows you to publish homework assignments, calendars, resources, important news, wikis, surveys and quizzes. It keeps everyone informed and linked together. Students won’t have any excuses to forget to do their assignments anymore… I said nothing. Forget it… They always come with excuses… But at least Edublogs will help them not to? That’s not all as Chris Wilson mentioned on his blog, Edublogs is targeted at those in Education rather than general blogging. As such they envision blogs being used to

• Facilitate discussion
• Replace paper newsletters
• Encourage students to blog
• Post videos podcasts and presentation
• Create a class publication

And provides many advantages according to Frank Calberg Services. Some of these advantages are:

• Using a blog makes education focused on demand
• Using a blog helps students learn anytime and anywhere
• Using a blog encourages learners to work/learn continuously

For the full list of advantages and some more information I really suggest to check out Frank Calberg Services’ slideshow.

As an ESL teacher, and agreeing with many other teacher, I must say that blogs are now great tools in classrooms and even greater tools if they are designed for that purpose. In recent years, it has been demonstrated that blogs enhance students’ motivation, creativity, communicative skills, and critical thinking, and what could you want more than your students to improve?

PowToon!

Hello dear readers,

Today I will present you a tool I just recently found. This tool is called PowToon. If you haven’t check out PowToon, you don’t know what you’re missing.PowToon is a video making free online software. It is quite simple to use and great to make small lesson videos or even animated slideshows. To create videos, PowToon works like animated video divided in slides, but if you are familiar with PowerPoint or Prezi, “slides” will be a breeze to use, so I will not go into much detail there. The slides are 20 seconds long and play automatically. In those slides, you can put texts, pictures, sounds and interactive buttons from a big selection from the website. You can even voice over your lessons to have oral instructions. Also, almost everything can be animated and you can make some real amazing things. However, the thing with the voice over option is that it isn’t that well done. You have to record your voice separately and cannot play your video in the same time. It was really inconvenient for me. It was so much inconvenient that I chose to record my voice with a third party software so that I could record it as my lesson was playing. But like I said, you can make some great videos quite easily. If it wasn’t for the bad voice over option, I would be in love. Also, PowToon has a free and pay to get more model, but I am not complaining. The free alternative still has a lot of resources to use and does the ob quite well.

PowToon can be a great teaching tool, letting you create fun, unique animated presentations. It can also provide students a unique platform for creating presentations as well, which can be a great tool in a Project Based Learning or other type of Active Learning classroom environment.

PowToon is more than just a flashy way to focus your students’ attention. It is also a great way to pack a lot of content into a few minutes of classroom time. Instead of having your students spend almost an hour listening to a lecture and practicing, they can spend a few minutes watching the video, save the link, and revisit the lesson later if needed.

I really think that PowToon has its place in classrooms or even outside of classrooms. PowToon can certainly be a fun addition to the Flipped Classroom. If you don’t know what is the Flipped Classroom yet, well… First, you haven’t read some of my posts and second, you are really missing on something. So, if you haven’t heard of flipped classroom, you should check it out. It is basically having students learn the content outside of classroom and leave the classroom for meaningful content that they can’t do at home. This is were PowToon is used. You make video lessons for your students to watch at home leaving more time in your classroom to practice and do the fun stuff.

PowToon is a great too to make nice and fun presentations and video lessons.

Here is an example of lesson made with PowToon

The world need your stories!

Dear readers,

Today I will present you a tool named Storybird. Storybird is a free online tool to create short, art-inspired stories. It also allow user to share, print and read other users stories. It is a fun and collaborative website to create stories. It is excellent for many writing assignments. It’s an engaging site that will help bring even the most hesitant writers out of their shell.  Storybird is quite simple to understand.

How does Storybird works? Put really simply, You create a story with this online tool using their text editor and picture bank. The images provide a great starting point for those who do not know what they would like to write about. This tool allow student to create story easily, really useful for younger students.

Storybird allows students to work in team and share their stories with other students. The privacy settings are also quite good allowing teachers to create a private group for their classes. Where Storybird really shines for me is that it can be used to have students write on their own. Also, the fact that students don’t have to publish their stories and keep them unpublished is a great option for longer assignments.

Students loved seeing how the story that they started would end. This not only became a great writing opportunity, but a great reading one as well!

I think that Storybird has its place in classrooms. First of all, it is a free tool so there is no budgetary reason to not even try it. Second, It makes writing text a lot less boring for the students as it give them chances to use technology and something different. Third, I think the images are a great way to help uninspired students to write magnificent story. Really, the first couple of pictures I saw on this website gave me multiple idea of topic to write about. Fourth, this tool can be used cooperatively as it allows students to share their work with others, comment and give feedback to their classmates. Fifth, it is really easy to use. Even elementary school graders can use it. And last, I think that the finished products are great and beautiful. They are a lot more than just black on white text. With the professional level pictures, it’s really amazing what students can create. I really think this tool will help students to create work they will be proud of and want to share with their family and friends. What can be more motivating than work that you are proud of and enjoy doing?

”Make any video your lesson”

Hello dear readers,

Today I will present you a website/tool I stumbled upon will browsing on the net. This tool is called EDpuzzle. What is EDpuzzle? Like you might have guessed by the title of this article, EDpuzzle is a free website that allows teacher to make any video there lesson.

How this tool works is quite simple. You can take a video of yourself doing a lesson or a video from Youtube, TED Ed, vimeo and many other websites and make it into a online video lesson. From this video, you can crop out the beginning or the end of the video, put your voice over the video to explain yourself, put audio notes and the most interesting feature: put quizzes in them. The editing options of this tool aren’t that great, but they do the job done quick if you aren’t necessarily good with video editing software. However, I recommend using a third party software if you really want to have a real custom video of your own and then upload it on EDpuzzle. Like you probably guessed, what I really find great about EDpuzzle is the ability to put question through out the video to see if your students understood it. Those question can be true or false, multiple choices or opened question. You can even use these quizzes to get comments or questions from your students. The audio notes are great too. It pauses the video for your students and play a recording of your voice to make a side note for them. It always for greater explanation if you want to or even link it with the material in class.

But what can you use video lesson for? It’s quite simple, if you haven’t heard of flipped classroom, you should check it out. It is basically having students learn the content outside of classroom and leave the classroom for meaningful content that they can’t do at home. As you guessed, the video lessons are to show the content outside of the classroom.

So yeah, EDpuzzle is a great tool to make the videos, but I recommend you to have a kind of classroom management tool like EDmodo or any other to efficiently share and post the videos to your students.

In conclusion, EDpuzzle is a very simple tool that walks teachers through the video lesson creation process, with only a few limitations. However, it isn’t that great of a video editing tool, but it compensate with some great features like the quizzes and being to see who did watch the video and if they understood it. EDpuzzle is to create video lessons, so if you don’t believe that video lessons and/or the flipped classroom approach are your style, you probably won’t use it. I think it is great time saver for many teachers and maybe made some think about using inverted classroom.

What if the classroom become an RPG?

Dear readers,

Today I shall present you a great way to bring fun and games to the classroom. It is called Classcraft. Gamification has an enormous potential in classrooms and Classcraft might just be the way you were searching to bring it to our class.

Classcraft is a free fantasy-themed, game-based classroom behavior management tool. It really does excels as a tool for classroom management and won’t disturb the material you wanted to teach. It won’t replace your lessons by games, it will make your lessons the game.

Classcraft is quite simple to understand. Your students must choose and avatar and a class with different benefits, going from real-life advantages such as being able to leave the class for two minutes or even to in-game advantages such as saving your team mates. Basically put, through out the year, students will gain points for beneficial behavior to the classroom giving them access to the previously mentioned advantages and lose points for bad behavior rewarding them with real-life consequences such as detentions. Classcraft also give teachers and students access to a post systems. I like this system. for example, teachers can post videos that the students should watch as homework and be awarded points by doing so. It is effective and simple.

For more information regarding the rules, see the following documents:

• Summary of the rules
• Student tutorial
• Teacher tutorial

I really think that Classcraft is an amazing tool for ESL teachers or almost any teachers for in that matter. I read that it was really motivating for the students. I mean, how wouldn’t it be? I am hyped by just thinking about it. If only I could be in a class using Classcraft…

Ricardo Higuera, a seventh grade history teacher, said ”Academically, I have noticed quiz scores and class-participation increase. […] Before, some of my more apathetic students wouldn’t care if they failed a quiz. Now, they’re more wary to because they know it affects their character’s level and team standings in the game”. I really think that the main point that I could speak of to sell you Classcraft would really be the motivational factors. Every teacher knows that motivation plays really a big part in the success of students and can sometimes be hard to obtain from some students. Gamification by using tools such as Classcraft is really one of the best way, or maybe even the best way to make your classroom involving and motivating for your students. ”By putting students into teams that must work together to succeed, Classcraft puts a new, more productive spin on traditionally individualized behavior management. Since students work together within the game’s premise,  the issues that arise feel less personal and punitive and more like challenges or obstacles to be tackled and surmounted together” says Caryn Swark. However, Higuera also mentions that ”the game, like anything else in education, depends on how it’s used by the teacher” and I am totally agreeing with him on that. A good tool can be used to create a mess if left in the wrong hands, but creates miracle in proper hands. Higuera also thinks Classcraft will be part of his teaching tool bag for years to come.

If you are still not convinced by Classcraft, and by that I don’t necessarily mean that you should obligatory use it in your classroom, everyone have their methods, or want to get more detailed information, you might want to take a look their official website and take 2 minutes to create a free account.

On this note, I will leave you on some testimonials from teachers and students who used Classcraft.

Kahoot!

Dear readers,

Today I will present you Kahoot.  Kahoot is web tool designed to integrate technologies and a game environment to your classroom. This tool is really great to add a little excitement to your classroom. Students and teachers enjoy this amazing tool. I had the chance to test it out with fellow student teacher and everyone was really hyped out about it and everyone had a great time.

This tool is quite simple and instinctive to use and the developers even created some tutorial if you ever need some help. Kahoot is a tool to create and play quizzes, discussions or even surveys using any device with a web browser. This include using a PC, laptop, iPad, iPhone, Android, Chromebook, Windows phone etc.

Kahoot allows teachers to create quizzes to review material with their students. Students compete in this quiz game and want to be the best at reviewing. It creates a nice and fun environment for the students and actually make them want to review. After sharing Kahoot with so many teachers, a fellow blogger named Ron, said that this is the one tool that teachers would come back to him and report that their students are actually requesting to review. Kahoot is really a great tool. It is simple to use and really effective. It really allows teachers to easily motivate their students to participate during review.

As Jannie said Kahoot is amazing and I suggest you visit her blog if you want to get your eyes on a real-life experiment. To finish this post, I really think that every teacher should at least try Kahoot once if it is possible for them. It’s really fun for the students and even the teachers.

Socrative

Greetings dear reader,

Today’s post is going to be about a tool that I learned about during my first practicum in the BEALS program. This tool is called Socrative. Socrative is a free tool used to online make quizzes. Socrative is mostly intended for quizzes during classroom time as it can only hold one pending active quiz at a time.

Socrative is a nice and easy tool with multiple options to create your quizzes. You can have multiple quizzes stored over the cloud that can be accessed from any computer with an internet connection. You can also share and import quizzes from fellow users.  Socrative also allows for three types of question: multiple choices, true/false and short answer. These types of question can mixed as you want in any of your quizzes. You can also give an explanation to every answers if you wish to. There is also many option for when the time to make your students answer the quiz comes. You can adjust the setting of your quiz so students get automatic feedback from their answers and you can randomize the questions and/or answers order. There is a type of quiz wish allow students to race against each other in completing it that is called Space Race. There is also the possibility to ask one single question to students or an exit ticket about the lesson you just made. You obviously can use it to make simple survey if you wish to.

One of the best feature of this tool is that all the result are shown in real time to the teacher and automatically saved to be archived. This tool also allows you to send the result charts to your e-mail, to your google drive or made into a downloadable files. This feature is nice as it allows the teacher to save great time correcting simple quizzes, actually save the results and shows when every student is done with the quiz. The chart make it really easy to see which have  students with difficulty the quiz or a question that was hard for the majority of the group as the success rate is always show for every question.

It is also quite easy to use. Students only need to go to m.socrative.com and enter the teacher’s room number. Then students simply enter their names and go on with the quiz while the teacher can check on their progress from his own computer or tablet or any device for that matters. Obviously, as you must have figured out, every students need a computer, smart phone or even Ipod to participate. So this tool is available to class with enough equipment for everyone, but nowadays it is quite common for school to be equipped with the necessary stuff or for every student to have a smart phone.

Socrative is really a nice and easy to use to (like seriously, it took me no time to get a hang of it) that will help any teacher with their small or even long quizzes.

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Edited April 14th

After some thoughts, I saw that I missed some points in this blog post. here they are.

Socrative is a fantastic tool for formative assessment that allows you to see how students are doing as they are doing it.  I think that pedagogically this is a great plus. You won’t have to spend hours to put your students’ results in a grid, it’s already made for you and it’s really great to have an overview of the material that your students did not know. You can also see it as they are doing it, giving YOU immediate feedback of your students success. It’s a really easy way to know what to review for the good of your students. It’s a quick and easy assessment of your students. It’s a great time saver, makes everything clearer/simple and help you to help your students.

Also, because you can set the quiz to give students immediate feedback on the multiple choice and true/ false questions, students know if their answer was right or wrong. I think it’s a great way for students to know where to improve. That’s great, opposed to some other form of quizzes where students never know if their answers were right or wrong, or have to meet the teacher after class to get their quiz back (they never do or almost would go see a teacher after class unless they have to). I think immediate feedback is great in that matter.

Giving you and your students feedback and easy access to quizzes (without wasting paper) is what makes Socrative a great tool for pedagogical purposes. Feedback is how you correct mistakes.

Integrating a website or an educational content management system to your classroom

Greeting dear reader,

Today’s post is going to be about integrating a website or an educational content management system into teaching practices.

Nowadays, internet is a great part of everyone’s daily life and there is lot of tools that teachers can get out of it. There are websites builder such as Wix and Weebly, there are blog creators at hand reach such as WordPress (which I am currently using) and Blogger, there are content management systems such as Edmodo and Class Dojo and of course, social networks, such as Facebook. In this time and age, almost everyone as access to internet. People who don’t are some rare occurrences and there is no reason to not use those useful tools.

I really think that these tools are amazing and give such an advantage to teachers and students compared to years ago. With those resources from these websites, students and the teachers can have access to everything they need from home. There is no need to meet your teacher in person as you have access to everything related to the class from a simple internet browser or even an app on your phone. If during my high school years I could have been able to reach my teacher from home and ask a simple question and not having to wait to meet this teacher the next day or maybe somewhere in the week because of some bad luck, I would have been quite happy and maybe wouldn’t forget to do my homework as often.

What is great about using tools like those is that there are some many. You can really pick the one you and your students prefer. Each website has its own advantages. For example, if you want something simple that is only used to display homework to students and maybe share some documents with them, you don’t need to create a whole website. You could use Facebook. It is easy to use and everyone or almost everyone has a Facebook account. It is even part of your students daily life. Imagine not having to answer to excuses like ” I didn’t know there was a homework” and that you could just answer that it was on Facebook for quite a long time.

If you want sometime that is really more of a classroom management system, you could use Edmodo. This website has lot of tools to answer all your need as a teacher as far as online educational content management system goes. Your students can submit their projects from there, share information to each other, have access to your course syllabus, practice exercises, quizzes, submit question to the teachers, see what is the homework and when it is due etc.

If you want to create a whole website for your class, go ahead. It is really easy to do so with the proper tools such as the one Wix offers. You could even ask students to create their own website or blog to display their project. I once participated in a photography course and we had to create a website to display or pictures. It was actually nice to be able to share and show what we had done.

Possibilities are limitless with the tools that are currently available to teachers now and I can’t see a reason teachers shouldn’t use those resources if used properly.

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Edited April 14th

I think that I left some point unattended in this post and that’s why I am posting this small complementary section.

As you probably got it by now, technology offer such great advantages and changes to the classroom and I really think it should not be disregarded. ”Technology changes the way teachers teach, offering educators effective ways to reach different types of learners and assess student understanding through multiple means. It also enhances the relationship between teacher and student. When technology is effectively integrated into subject areas, teachers grow into roles of adviser, content expert, and coach. Technology helps make teaching and learning more meaningful and fun.”

If you haven’t had the chance to see that technology is spreading in many school boards, I will tell you that it is and that the use of ICTs is mandatory for every teachers here. ”Since it’s clear that tech integration is here to stay, it is not a question of whether teachers integrate technology into their classrooms, but rather how to do it best.” There are multiple exellent ways to do so, but one that especially hit me was the flipped classroom. I have posted about it in later post but, If you haven’t heard of flipped classroom, you should check it out. It is basically having students learn the content outside of classroom and leave the classroom for meaningful content that they can’t do at home. This method is especially great for ESL as so much content can be viewed with interactive videos outside of classes and leave the precious in-class time with our students to have them practice their English. They most likely won’t practice their English outside of classroom, maybe out of laziness, maybe out of apathy or maybe even lack of resources and that is why I think flipped classroom is great.

I will make this long introduction post short, this blog will be about technological tools that ESL teachers can integrate in their classroom to make teaching and learning more meaningful and fun.