Friday Matinee: Engagement With Digital Escape Rooms

Digital escape rooms (also called digital breakouts) are a spin on the popular Escape Rooms and are a great way to bring game playing, group work, collaboration, and problem solving into your classroom.  They can also be done remotely!

Jason Reed, the Digital Learning Coach at Marshall County Schools, has created this great tutorial on creating and using digital escape rooms in your classroom.  

EscapeRoom PD

He's embedded an example on slide 2 and more ideas on slide 3.  If you are a math nerd, I highly recommend this one: Shape Escape.

Here's an easy Halloween Haunt Escape Room.  Click in different places in the image to get your clues.

For more ideas on creating or using an digital escape room (there are many shared examples online) for your class, check out these additional resources:

30+ Digital Escape Rooms (Plus a Step by Step Guide for Creating Your Own

40+ Digital Escape Rooms

Creating your clues is half the fun!  You can even have your students help you with these and put them all together in an escape room to challenge your class.

How to Create a Digital Breakout for the Classroom (has great ideas for clues!)

Breakout EDU Digital Resources (great sites for sites to use to create your clues)

Your "locks" should be created in Google Forms using response validation.  Here's a helpful post on using response validation in a Form.  Remember that they have to get the answer right in order to submit their form and breakout!

KATE challenges you to create an escape room for at least one of your classes and we would love for you to share it with us!  Need help?  Let us know.

Did You Know? Group and Color Code Tabs in Google Chrome

Did you know that you can group and color code tabs in Google Chrome?  Believe it or not, I didn't know that you could do this until just now!  Check out this video to learn how to group tabs by topics and colors:

Name and Color Code Chrome Tab Groups

Happy grouping, y'all!

Friday Matinee: Using Nearpod for Engagement & Formative Assessment

As you start planning your classes for the rest of the semester, you might want to check out this post on engagement while teaching remotely.  If you scroll down to where it says Keep it simple with eLearning modalities, you'll see where the author mentions using Flipgrid and Pear Deck with her online college classes.  We've sent out information on using both in previous Friday Matinees.

Nearpod is an add-on for Google Slides and works with PowerPoint and is very similar to Pear Deck.  Here's a comparison of both tools.  Both have free versions and offer interactivity during presentations with either Google Slides or Microsoft PowerPoint.  The free version of Nearpod seems to have more interactive features available than Pear Deck.  Like Edpuzzle, you can also make your videos interactive.  Nearpod offers some pre-made interactive lessons and videos with the basic plan and your lessons can be presented live or in student-paced mode, which is great for online learning.  You can also add a lesson to Zoom with one click!

If you go here, you'll find some resources that KATE has curated to help you learn more about Nearpod by clicking on the link at the top of the page. There are videos on getting started, using it with PowerPoint, Google Slides, Canvas, and more

Back to Pear Deck for a minute:

In case you are more of a Peardeck fan, here's a link to get 3 months of unlimited access to all of Pear Deck's premium features. When the 90 days is up, you can go back to a basic free account. Not sure when this deal with end.

Friday Matinee: How to be an Effective Blended Teacher

Good afternoon!  It's almost the weekend and time for the Friday Matinee.  This week I'm sharing a video with you that is focused on K-12, but there's a lot of great ideas for teaching effectively in a hybrid learning environment.  I suggest that you watch at least the first half of the video.

How to be an Effective Blended Teacher

Emma Pass, the presenter on this webinar, is currently writing a book called The Hybrid Teacher and she's shared a lot of information in a PDF with excerpts from the book. 

She mentions several of the Google tools that she uses with her students, but she also uses Padlet, Flipgrid (which was actually developed for higher ed), and Parlay.  Each of these are great tools for teaching remotelly.  I've never used Parlay and found this blog post as a great place to get started with it.

❗ FREE Educational Technology Conference - Future of Education Technology Conference

This is one of the premier edtech conferences to attend and this year it is virtual and FREE.  I highly suggest that you register and try to attend just one session a day.  I think you'll find that your mind will be blown! 🤯

 Another resource I thought I would share is from Jake Miller and is a collection of technology tutorial links for teachers with another collection for students and parents.  

Friday Matinee: Using Pear Deck for Engagement & Formative Assessment

It actually feels like fall outside and it looks like it is going to be a great weekend to do something outside.  If you have a little time either over the weekend or sometime next week, take a look at Pear Deck.  It works with Google Slides (or PowerPoint) to help you add active learning and formative assessment to your presentations with learners of all ages.  There's a free and paid version of Pear Deck and I suggest you start with the basic free version.  You can add interactive questions, polls, quizzes, and formative assessments right into your presentation.  You can control the pace of the class so that everyone (including those who are attending on Zoom) will be on the same slide at the same time.  Or you can enable your students to work through the presentation on their own.  Let's take a look by checking out these links:

Pear Deck Tutorial For Google Slides

Webinar: Using Pear Deck + Zoom to Make Learning Interactive in a Remote Learning or Online Class

20 Ways to Use Pear Deck to Engage Students

Ideas for Using Pear Deck in the Classroom

And there's lots of tutorials and blog posts on the Pear Deck website!

Friday Matinee: Using EDpuzzle to Improve Video Engagement

Want to know who watched a video you posted as an assignment?  EDpuzzle is an online program that allows you to create interactive video lessons by embedding questions and comments into videos from YouTube, Khan Academy, National Geographic, TED Talks, and more.  When these videos are assigned through EDpuzzle, you can see how much time a student spent on the video and how well they did on the questions.  It even gives you superpowers that prevent your students from skipping right to the questions!

The basic, free plan allows you to create 20 videos and share them with your class as an assignment.  To learn more about how to use EDpuzzle, I'm including a playlist of 8 videos, but you can skip #7 on integrating EDpuzzle with Google Classroom.  Want to know how much the students learned about a topic?  Let THEM create an EDpuzzle as a student project.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU6wYnG1CMASfLsEtFqGaYYskEB7rvH25

Want more information on using it with Canvas?  Go here and click on Using EDpuzzle With Canvas.

This app is being used by K-12 schools and universities for online learning.  You can even add screencasts you create.

Friday Matinee: Using Google Slides: Jigsaw Activity

 

It's Friday - and it's a long weekend!  That gives you plenty of time to create a Jigsaw activity to use with your class in the near future.  What is a Jigsaw activity?  It breaks your students into groups and your topic into pieces, allowing for each group to work on a given subtopic.  The students then bring their part of the topic puzzle back to the group to put it all together.  You can use the attached Google Slides Jigsaw file as a template to create your own Jigsaw activity.  The video shows you how to edit the file and make it your own. 

The Jigsaw template: http://bit.ly/SlidesJigsaw

The video on how to edit the template:  https://youtu.be/MGTwR2HtX3c

This activity can easily be used during remote learning!  All of your students can edit the file at the same time and communicate with their group using messaging or a video call.  Be aware though that if they are going this during class time that they will have to move to different places to not have audio feedback from multiple microphones and still maintain their social distancing.