FTT - Dotstorming

Real-Time Group Collaboration with Dotstorming

@LisaBerghoff/@Joe_EdTech

According to Mirriam-Webster, brainstorming is defined as a group problem-solving technique that involves the spontaneous contribution of ideas from all members.  Brainstorming is such an important part of the learning process.  It is imperative that students learn how to generate ideas, collaborate, and then make decisions about next steps for problem-solving. 

The main issue with traditional brainstorming in the classroom is that not every voice is heard. We tend to cater to our outgoing, confident students in these activities.  It's not that the quiet kids don't have thoughts to contribute, they are just, well, quiet.  Also, once your list of ideas has been generated, the next step is to discuss the merits of each idea and then make decisions about next steps.  Again, this is an exercise that will most often involve a few students. It can be awkward to make these choices as a group, even if all voices are heard.  When the goal is to engage and involve all of our students, it's time to add some new tools to our toolbox.

I'm excited to tell you about Dotstorming. Dotstorming is a real-timegroup brainstorming and decision making app.  This free tech tool allows all of your students to participate in brainstorming activities in 4 easy steps.  You create a dotstorming board, invite participants, add ideas, and vote on the ideas that you like. This site is no-frills and easy to use.  You can whip up a dotstorming board right in the middle of class and your students will think you're a genius.  Here is a video showing you the features of Dotstorming. 

Want to try Dotstorming as a participant? Click on this Dotstorming board to brainstorm your favorite tech tools.  Please feel free to add images or text. Don't have anything to add?  That's ok, just take a look at what is on there and vote for your favorites.  I can't wait to see which one wins!

Happy Dotstorming!

FTT - Randomizers

photo credit: vial3tt3r via photopin cc

Tools For Random Selection or Random Grouping

@joe_edtech

Happy New Year! And while 2015 is just getting underway, Semester 1 at Deerfield High School is rapidly coming to a close. For a lot of you that means students will be presenting in class and reviewing for final exams. But how do you choose presentation order? How do you really mix up the study groups? In this post, I'll offer two online tools that will help you select student names truly at random and one downloadable tool that will help you select random student groups. 

Random Name Picker

First, for random selection, Random.org and Random Name Picker are two free and easy to use Web 2.0 tools for selecting students at random. Random Name Picker, part of a larger suite of free web apps from classtools.net, adds a visual element to the process of picking names. Simply copy and paste a list of students and then spin the wheel online. If you have a free account, you can save your lists to use again later. Also, this tool is HTML5, which means it works on Chromebooks, iPads, and other mobile devices. Random.org is less visually stimulating, but has many more options. On Random.org, you can pick random names, lists, numbers, or number sequences. (As an aside, you can also generate random passwords for your online accounts.)

If you are comfortable using Excel, you can download a tool created and generously shared by one of my colleagues. Click the link here and download the Excel file called "RandomGroups." When you open the spreadsheet, you will need to enable editing and enable macros (Excel will prompt you to do so.)

Copy and paste your class roster in column B under the "Roster" heading. Then simply enter the number of groups you want to create, click the "reset all" button, and then click "fill all." If you need to, you can still add or remove individual members of any group.

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Have a better way for choosing at random? Please, tell us how in the comment section below.

FTT - Blubbr Trivia

Blubbr - Trivializing the Classroom...

in a Good Way!

@joe_edtech

Last Winter, my daughter and I were riveted to the TV every afternoon during Jeopardy. One of my former students, a former Scholastic Bowl Captain, had a 6 day run on the TV show racking up more than $100,000 worth of winnings. I haven't told him this part yet, but I take full credit for his victories. For each of the days I watched the show with my daughter and a former colleague and his college aged daughter. So, there were at least four of us, and sometimes more of us, sitting in the family room shouting answers to trivia questions at Alex Trebek. I'm not sure he heard us, but it was great fun anyway.

So, continuing a "Gamify your Classroom" theme we started when we discussed Kahoot:

Alex, for $200 I'll take "Gaming in the Classroom." The answer is, "This Web 2.0 Product lets students and teachers play and create video trivia, and it costs nothing to use." -- What is "blubbr.tv?" "Circle gets the square!" (Wait, that might be a different show.)

I could take some time to tell you how to use Blubbr.tv, but I think it would be more effective for you to learn about Blubbr from Blubbr - Click here to play the Blubbr Triv Game!

In a nutshell, Blubbr lets your create a series of questions based on short YouTube videos. These can be videos that you created and uploaded, or they can be videos that already exist on YouTube.


Not only great for formative assessment, Blubbr seems like a great way to reteach or reinforce a topic with students who struggle to chunk information on their own. On the other hand, it can just be good clean fun to review old topics or introduce new ones.

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Have another good Web 2.0 game to play in the classroom? Tell us about it below.

FTT - Kahoot!

https://getkahoot.com/

Gamify Your Classroom with Kahoot!

@joe_edtech

Quite independent of one another, I found two very interesting pieces of research that have changed some of my perspectives on using games in the classroom. One is Dr. Ali Carr-Chellman's work on using games to engage boys in the classroom (I linked to her TED Talk - worth it! I saw her give a version at a conference I attended last Fall). The other is a research study I read on the effectiveness of using student response systems for formative assessment in the classroom (Beatty & Gerace, 2008). I'm still not sure Kahoot! would have caught my eye except that I worked with a Transition to High School Language Arts class last summer in which the teacher used Kahoot! every day to teach grammar to his very challenging students. At the end of the semester, each of the students identified "Playing Grammar Games" as the thing they loved most about summer school. GRAMMAR GAMES!

So what is Kahoot! anyway? If you teach a Freshman Advisory, you've probably seen our Librarians use it to introduce topics for discussion. It is an online student response system with a gaming component. Ever been to a bar and seen different tables playing the interactive trivia game on all the TVs? (Of course I would never enter one of those dens of iniquity, but I've heard about them.) Kahoot! is a lot like that for your classroom. Here's the short demo Kahoot! offers on their website:

Kahoot! is completely device agnostic. You can play it on your phone, on your Chromebook, on a tablet - anything that has Internet access. And, one of the things I like best about Kahoot! is that your students don't need to sign up for an account. They just need to go to kahoot.it and access your game. In order to create games (aka - formative assessments), you simply need to go to getkahoot.com and make a free account for yourself. Once you've done that, Kahoot! offers you step by step instructions for creating and sharing your first Kahoot!, or you can search through public Kahoots! and play one of those with your kids.

Wanna see what happens when Kahoot! is played in the classroom? Click Here.
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Do you help your kids learn with games? Or have you seen better online student response systems? If so, please tell us more in the comment section below.