What is BreakoutEDU?"BreakoutEDU is based on breakout rooms where people are locked inside a room and must use teamwork and critical thinking skills to solve puzzles to break their way out. It's taking education by storm; but instead of locking our kids in our classrooms, they are locked out of a mysterious box." ~Mari Venturino The basics of it are you have a simple wooden box locked with 6 separate locks that students have to find clues and solve problems in order to unlock all of the locks to get the box open. Students must work together, share information and ideas. They need to rely on each other to move forward in the process. It is engaging as students will be moving around the room looking for clues. It is fun, even if you don't solve all of the problems and succeed in opening the box. My wife and I went to an escape room in Green Bay with some friends recently and had a great time working through the process, even though we came up short of escaping. We were told only 30% are successful I am hoping they weren't just trying to make us feel better about ourselves. But whether you succeed or not, it is an amazing experience that I hope you will consider using with your students. Here is a post by Mari Venturino with more details about the set up of BreakoutEDU. She has created her own BreakoutEDU games and the BreakoutEDU.com site has many more examples of games/lessons you can use with your students. There are many based on content or grade levels, otherwise we could work together to create or modify games to meet your learning objectives. Escape Rooms nearbyEscape rooms are what the Breakout boxes are based off of. As I mentioned my wife and I attempted to escape and I thought it was worth sharing that there are rooms in Green Bay and Appleton, and other in Madison, Milwaukee, LaCrosse and other locations throughout Wisconsin if you were looking for something fun to do.
Breakout Green Bay Escape Room Wisconsin
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What are Booksnaps?Have you heard of Booksnaps? It is something relatively new, but is gaining momentum in the education world in many subject areas. I will share a post from Tara Martin who is credited with coming up with the concept, but want to talk a little about the idea and how it fits into GBAPS before I do. Before I lose some of you, the concept isn't just for literature, it can be used in any area where students are engaging in textual materials, but could also be used by students taking picture of items to explain concepts like math problems, science experiments etc.. Booksnaps is the idea of taking a picture of a page of text and then adding a text field with a summary of the ideas, circling key concepts or adding images to help demonstrate the key points of the writing. Here are a few examples of booksnaps I created using the book Teach Like A Pirate by Dave Burgess. Read this section carefullyHere is the part you need to take note - The original version calls for using Snapchat. Her post also calls for using other apps as alternatives like Snapchat that have not gone through our Media Resource Checklist. Let me state that again - I caution you against using the suggested technologies that have not gone through the process to check Terms of Service or Student Data Privacy. Booksnaps Why would I share this if you aren't able to use the technologies?I shared this because it is a really cool way to engage students in connecting to what they are reading in a new and different way. Here are some examples that Tara Martin shared. And we can replicate the final product with technologies available to us that are approved for student use. The final thought on technology is Snapchat isn't available for students under 13, and would need to be loaded onto a student's personal phone to use, but the technologies listed in the next section can be used by all students K-12. GBAPS approved technologies for BooksnapsI explored the following options for creating products similar to the Booksnaps created on Snapchat. With the iPad and Google Slides - you are able to take pictures and annotate them all in Google Slides on the iPad. I first thought I could take a picture and then edit it in Google Drawing, but that wasn't available on an iPad. So I signed into Google Drive, opened Google Slides and clicked the + sign to insert an image. I chose to use the camera, took a picture and it loaded on the first slide. I was then able to add text and even circled an area of the image that I wanted to highlight. When the circle was created it was a solid color and I wasn't able to see the image behind it so I clicked on the fill icon and changed it to none and was left with a clear view of the image and just the line of the circle around it. See example below. iPad or phone and Computer and Google Drawing - is similar to the process above, but has more steps to it. I share this as an alternative if you have limited number of iPads, or if students are using their own phones to complete the process. you are able to use the iPad or phone to take the picture and then send this to yourself either through your Google Drive or via email. They will complete the next steps on a computer. When they have the image in their Drive they will be able to open Google Drawings and insert the image into Drawings. With the image inserted they are able to crop it, adjust size, add text, shapes, etc. like you could in Google Slides. The advantage of Drawings is it saves the image as an image file which can then be inserted into other products like a Google Doc, or shared as an individual image. The advantage of doing it Slides is you would have all of the images a student created for their project in one place. Both examples can create as elaborate or as simple a product as you would like. Both are accessible to all of our students as they use approved technologies. 6 Alternatives to Reading LogsI am in no way an expert in teaching literacy, but found this post by Shaelynn Farnsworth to be very interesting and thought it was worth sharing. Her number one example is Booksnaps which we just explored above. Some of these integrate technology and some do not, but all of them ask students to engage in literature differently than I was asked to back in the day. One example that isn't part of the post, is one that I took from Kelly Gallagher. His idea I think he called 20 questions. He asked students during the reading of a piece of literature to come up with 20 questions that couldn't be answered in the text. He said he was tired of playing the cat and mouse game with students. He wanted to make sure they were reading and understanding the text, and they were trying to guess what questions he might ask. When I implemented this strategy in Social Studies, I reduced the number of questions to 3 as we weren't reading lengthy texts. What I found was students were more engaged in the passages and it lead to conversations not a question and answer session where I had those "Bueller, Bueller, Anyone, Anyone" moments. I wasn't asking the questions, the students were, and often they had questions that made me think differently about the information. More Alternatives to Reading LogsHere is another post providing ideas for students to engage in the text they are reading in a multitude of ways. What I like about this post is the multitude of examples. It incorporates sketchnoting to engage those students who maybe more visual or artistic. It also uses the idea of Twitter to have students create a synopsis in a limited number of words as Twitter is 140 characters.
GoAnimate is a fun an easy way to create video projects for a multitude of content areas. Students use GoAnimate to create animated videos using text to speech where the character speaks what is typed, or they could use their own voices. GoAnimate is available via the classlink launchpad and should be accessible using your Google login. GoAnimate is currently going through some changes as it updates its platform from Flash to HTML5 which is makes it easier to view on multiple devices. During this change GoAnimate has lost many of the templates it had such as the presidential debate template, or the school template that were used frequently for projects. Currently there are 3 main themes but many more will be added. Ideas for GoAnimate:
These are just a few ideas on how you could leverage the GoAnimate software to create video projects with your students. Below is a video example of using GoAnimate with backgrounds from a Google Slides Virtual Museum Template. Students could add their own artifacts to create an online portfolio. Another option as the last segment of the video illustrates, is to create a travel brochure where students can use images of monuments or other places of interest to share stories of their travel or inform their audience of the country they are studying.
This week I met with Erika Schoen and discussed the request some teachers have expressed in learning new ways for students to share their understanding of concepts. During the conversation we came up with a few, but seemed to find a real interest in Paper Slide Videos.
The presentation below is the result of Erika's efforts to create an overview for staff and she has been gracious enough to let me share it with you so I don't have to try and create instructions or examples. To create this project you need paper, markers, and iPads or a camera. If you do it from top down that set up will work. If you have chromebooks or laptops you can use the webcam and would need to hold the papers in front of the camera to achieve the same effect. Please let me know if you have any questions and Thanks to Erika for sharing! |
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September 2018
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