So you started using Flipgrid last year and your kids thought it was awesome, until about
the 20th Flipgrid assignment came, and then began the, "Ugh do we have to do another Flipgrid?"
So you hit them with Nearpod and it was so cool until eventually they were like, "Can
we just do this on Google Slides?" Edpuzzle. They'll never tire of Edpuzzle. I am all for
finding tools that work and then sticking with them. But it's nice to have something
in the back pocket that you can take out, whether just to mix things up for yourself
at the start of a new year, or to change it up for the kids when some of your tried and
true tools start to feel a little bit stale. Let's take a look at five apps that you can
use to mix things up in your classroom. Howdy folks, I'm Thom Gibson with New EdTech Classroom,
where we show you how to teach with technology to create relevant and engaging experiences
for your students. I tried to think of apps for this video that weren't really on all
the "Best EdTech Tools That You Need to be Using Right Now" lists that you find online.
So let me know if you actually have tried some of the ones on this list. First app to
try to mix things up in your classroom is Headspace. Headspace is an app that has all
of these recordings that lead you through these mindfulness and meditation sessions.
Now, if you hear the words mindfulness and meditation, and you're like, eh, not for me,
I implore you to consider this at least for the sake of your students, who could really
benefit from it. It's not about sitting in a chair and going "Ommm" and trying to clear
your mind of any thoughts whatsoever, but instead mindfulness is about creating an awareness
of your physical or emotional or mental state and wellbeing. As you breathe in, just feeling
the lungs expand as they fill with air. And as you breathe out, just feeling the body
soften a little bit, as you gently close the eyes. This is going to be more important than
ever for the students in our classrooms. Some students have not been back in school buildings
since March of 2020. You're going to have students that are fearful, that are anxious,
that are uncertain, that are disconnected. Mindfulness is a practice that is going to
meet students in those places and begin to give them tools to tend to their own mental
health and mental wellbeing. Headspace has a ton of guided meditations that you can play
through your phone, whether you have an Android or an Apple, or you can use their desktop
version as well. I recommend trying the app for a few days on your own before implementing
it in your classroom. And they've got a lot of basics of meditation sessions that I would
start with, that range from 30 seconds to basically as long as you would want the meditation
session to last. And they've even got sessions based particularly on what you're feeling
or what you're going through. It typically costs $12 a month, but it is free for educators.
They even have a bunch of resources of how to begin to introduce these mindfulness practices
to your students. The next app is Classkick. Classkick is similar to apps like Nearpod,
in that you can create these interactive lessons and see the students' responses in real time,
but Classkick is much more optimized for self-paced work, so not as much, like, presentation,
whole group stuff. And the real magic is in the teacher dashboard. And so you have a presentation
or assignment that students are working through, and you can see everybody's work on one page,
or you can filter it and say, "I want to see what everyone is doing on slide one," and
just have that on the screen. You can open up the slides while the students are working
on it, and then you can begin to annotate and leave your feedback there. And if there's
certain feedback that you're pretty much constantly giving to students, you can turn those into
stickers and then just click on the sticker list and pull that sticker of that feedback
and place it on that slide. There are some auto grading features in there as well. You'll
see green if the students have gotten it all right, or yellow if they've gotten more than
half of the problems right, or red if they have gotten more than half wrong or just haven't
completed the problems. The actual sides have most of the generic whiteboard tools that
you would expect, like a pen, a highlighter, and text, as well as the ability to insert
a picture, either from their computer or using their webcam, and the ability to record audio,
which is a great way to have students explain their thinking without having to write it
all out. Goo-goo, gah-gah, the answer is six. In Classkick you can have students raise their
digital hand, whether they need a check or whether they have a question, and you can
enable it that students can see when one of their classmates has their hand raised, and
then they can go and help that student on their slide. Classkick does have some pre-made
content, but it's not a massive library, so it's really ideal if you've got slides or
presentations that you've turned into PDFs that you can pull in and then start adding
the ways that you want the students to interact with them. Our next app is Bulb. Bulb is a
digital portfolio and a place that students can showcase some of their best work. It's
similar to Google Sites and Adobe Spark, if you ever used those, in that you've got a
page and you can embed images and text and headings, but Bulb was designed specifically
to be used as a portfolio. It's got a nice presentable look to it, and it's fairly intuitive
to use, and each page that you make, you can organize into a collection. You can use Bulb
as an alternative to Google Docs or Google Slides, as a tool for students to present
their work, and doing so gives them a different medium to work with. They get to learn a little
bit more of how they want to design it, what images they want to use, embedding videos
into the page, all of which I think are easier and cleaner looking on Bulb than it is on
Google Docs or Google Slides. Also, you can leave comments on their Bulb page. They are
public comments, so I wouldn't put the student's grade if you're grading what they're putting
there, and you can either have them on the side of the actual content or down at the
bottom of the page, like a blog comment. And Bulb is not just for students. If you, as
a teacher, want to use it to present some of your lessons and your assignments to students,
it's great for that. The next app is StoryCorps. StoryCorps is a company whose mission is to
get people to have meaningful and engaging conversations with the loved ones in their
life. Think kids interviewing their grandparents and asking what it was like growing up for
them. StoryCorps has developed a platform where you can actually record these conversations
and then just keep them for private use, or you can make them public, and the public recordings
actually get preserved in the Library of Congress as an archive of our collective history of
our stories. Me and my wife actually started doing this last year, like two months after
our daughter was born. COVID had just started, and we're like, what if we just recorded a
conversation between the two of us, just as a way of something we can look back on and
listen about what it was like being new parents? And then after we did it, it was so awesome.
We were like, we should do this every year around her birthday and just kind of talk
about what the last year was like. And so this past year we went back and we listened
to the first one that we did, which was so funny because it was like, "Yeah, there's
the COVID-19. I think it's going to be gone in like a couple of weeks or something." But
just to have that time where we didn't have our phones, we weren't distracted, it was
just the two of us intentionally making time to have this meaningful conversation. And
then to have it recorded as something that we'll be able to share with our children and
our grandchildren of what life was like for us in this moment in time, it's invaluable.
You want to talk about Audrey's personality?" "Yeah. She's pretty funny. She really likes
to laugh a lot. Sometimes we don't know what she's laughing at." I love this. Kids are
rarely put in a situation where they are the ones conducting the interview and thinking
through, like, meaningful questions that they're interested in, and it teaches them to be more
present and in the moment with the person that they're with. And what better time to
give students the opportunity to have these types of conversations, than this time where
many of them have been isolated and separated. You don't need fancy equipment to do this.
StoryCorps has an app that you can just place in between you and the person that you're
talking to, as well as a web version where you can actually have these conversations
remotely if you're not able to do them in person. Their website has tons of resources
for educators on how to structure this for a classroom lesson, as well as a lot of different
questions and prompts that you can ask, depending on who you're interviewing. Next up on the
list is Classcraft. Classcraft! Classcraft is a behavior and learning management platform,
in the form of a fantasy role-playing game that lasts the whole school year. So students
get a character and they can earn experience points for that character through positive
behaviors, like being on time or attending office hours, or completing extra work, or
getting all your homework in for the week, or really anything that you would like to
see more of in the classroom. As they level up, they can purchase items, using crystals.
Things like an assignment re-do or class snack time. They can also lose health points, or
HP, for any unwelcome behaviors in the classroom. Losing all of your health points could result
in a consequence called a pledge. And the pledge is actually randomly chosen from a
list that you create. I think the default ones that are in there are actually kind of
interesting, like creating a video on how you can make better decisions, or make a meme
about how to have a better attitude. And let's not forget the gold pieces that students can
use to customize their avatar, which is always fun. If one student loses health points, that
actually impacts the health points of their team. And so there's some accountability there
and students can help one another out if they have a character that is able to give and
share health points with another student. So it's an organic way that some positive
classroom culture can emerge, from students working together and helping one another out.
With the premium version, students can go on a quest, which is taking your classroom
content and then plugging it into this kind of story arc that the student goes through.
And there's also accounts for parents, so they can monitor what's going on in the classroom,
and when students are gaining or losing certain points. Everything I've heard about Classcraft
is that the kids love it. It brings a little bit of levity to the classroom and you are
meeting the students where they're at, which is the world of gaming. And the nice thing
is when you create an account, it actually takes you through a story that shows you how
to use Classcraft. So you go to the story and you see all the teacher features, and
the students can go through the story and see all of the features that they'll be experiencing
from their perspective. And so that makes it a lot less overwhelming, because there
is a lot you can do with the platform. It's a great all-in-one platform for classroom
management, student engagement, parent communication, and even content review. As you are thinking
of new apps to try for your classroom, it's also worth thinking about new projects that
you can do that maybe you haven't done before. So check out this video that Sam created about
10 creative projects, like having students create a podcast, or write their own ebook,
or build simple webpages. Lots of ideas worth checking out. Thanks so much for watching
and we will see you in the next video.