Do you remember the last time you came across a wonderful piece of tech?
I made photo-cards of my kids for their grandmothers -- on my phone, using five minutes of my time (It’s still heartfelt, Mom!)
- When we go for a walk in the neighborhood, I love to check my Zillow app and see how much that house is going for (I should have bought THAT house...)
I have recently discovered the joys of Uber -- a few taps on the phone and I had a wonderful driver in a nice-smelling car (unlike the last stinky taxi I took) ready to drive me home in under four minutes!
- In the classroom, you all know I think PLICKERS is one of the most amazing pieces of classroom technology to come along in a decade -- and so much LESS work for the teacher than any equivalent... I have seen so many of you use it in so many different ways!
Well, this week, I came across another cool piece of tech....
I know we used to shy away from digital pieces as homework, but I have had a recent revelation. You probably realized this a while ago.
Almost every kid has access to a device. If they don’t have a smartphone (or two!), their buddy next to them does. Their mom does. The media center does. The public library does. Their basketball coach does. As long as we aren’t giving them time-consuming tasks, they can TOTALLY do digital homework.
So what I love ... is Blendspace.
They can do digital homework in a way they like to learn.
Blendspace is a free web tool for teachers to collect resources in one place to form a bundled, interactive lesson for students (or colleagues). A Blendspace lesson is where you pull in videos from Youtube, websites, pictures, links from Google ... or even Google Drive documents. And your kids get to access it from any device.
Which is super cool.
But as we wrap up the year, I discovered how amazing it is to ... waitforitwaitforitwaitforit ... differentiate review.
I often struggled to differentiate my reviews.
Watch this math teacher explain how she does that in under 3 minutes (use this link, not the picture of the video. Sorry. Technical difficulties. Hahahaha)
That quick video boggled my mind. The thought of curating all of my various review materials all on one page and have the kids review the WAY they learn best on the BENCHMARKS that they NEED help with ...
BOOM!!
Mind. Blown.
How many times have I reviewed as a whole-class even though different kids needed different review?
How many times did I have kids review what I thought they needed to review instead of letting them choosing the areas to review?
How many times did I review in ONE style -- all games, for example, instead of varying videos, readings, games, and websites?
With Blendspace, it take One Link to Review Them All.
And yes, you can set up your classes, and add quizzes, and have them auto-graded and whatnot. And I highly encourage you to check that out in the summer or fall. Because you don’t HAVE to do that stuff.
Seeing that it’s MAY, I would totally just jump into it with that link and save the setting-up-of-classes for next year. That’s too much for the end of the year.
Here’s my Civics Benchmark 4.1 https://www.tes.com/lessons/FmVnj-PEs3eyjA/civics-4-1
Here’s one on the contributions of Ancient Rome https://www.tes.com/lessons/E1n-IIzeQUPxhA/rome (I actually did that Rome one in 8 minutes)
What do you think? Can you figure out ways to teach or remediate or flip your classroom with Blendspace? I can’t get over the possibilities. One link to review them all....
Try it out and let me know how it goes. As always, email me at newmantr@pcsb.org
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