Well, it has been a week since we started Classcraft. I have learned so much, so fast, about giving and taking away points and just navigating the dashboard. The kids seem to LOVE it, even though we had quite a few fall in battle this week due to a Random Event. I made some adjustments to the point system and am set to add in content grades that are associated with points. It is a lot, but it might just be a great thing to have happen for this last quarter of the year to keep enthusiasm and interest high (theirs and mine).

Many parents have gotten on board. From the parent account, students can be awarded GP or Gold Points for finishing their homework or cleaning up around the house. GP are used to buy gear like boots and shields.

Quite a few students have jumped into the Powers and Messaging aspects of the game. I now have another site to respond to besides my email accounts and Edmodo.

We haven’t explored Quests or Battles just yet, nor have we used the Wheel of Destiny. The game is extensive. I like the customizable aspects of it. I like that I can personalize the Sentences and adjust the point system.

One of my homeroom students asked if I could expand it to include times that aren’t science and I’m thinking that I will add my homeroom as a class but maybe not until after the standardized testing week after next.

So far I would have to say that launching Classcraft has been worth all of the time and effort I have put into it.

There is a Freemium version that covers behavior. The Premium version allows me to add content to the game.

If you are looking for something to spark your students and perhaps modify their behavior, then I recommend looking into Classcraft.

Since I have begun tweeting, I have discovered some wonderful resources. One of those resources is Alice Keeler. She is a Google Guru for sure. She has a website called Teacher Tech. She shares tools that we have available but just don’t know about or aren’t sure how to use. Just today, I was using Google Keep in the taxi on the way back from my doctor’s appointment to add to my to-do list. When I got home, Alice had tweeted a link to her site about how to use Google Keep in the classroom with students. I am going to get my kids on it right away. They can convert notes to Google docs, they can record notes, they can take pics of images with text that then become editable. It is amazing and all I have been doing is putting reminders on mine. There is an app and a web-based version. There is color coding and labeling available, too, for organizing all of these notes and thoughts and reminders.

Kasey Bell is another Twitter user who provides great ideas about Chrome Extensions and Apps as well as other tools on her Shake Up Learning blog. Many of these extensions and apps help EAL students read or understand a page. Some, like Flubaroo, help teacher productivity and efficiency. There is one that will summarize a web page/article for you if it is too long to read! Most of them are free for teachers.

If you are a math teacher, then you should be following Monica Burns, but she isn’t limited to math. I always read her tweets to see if anything applies to my teaching. Find her ideas here on Class Tech Tips.

The last site I will share with you today is TeachThought. It is often about technology, but not always. I frequently share TeachThought articles on Facebook and I follow them on Twitter. I find their posts thought-provoking–hence the name, right? They create interesting infographics and other illustrations that I like to use or have handy for presentations.

So there you have it–a few folks/sites to get ideas from. If you visit one of these sites and get inspired to try something, please make a comment and let me know how it went.

Our tech director sends us emails now and then with some cool tools to try out. This is one I decided to try. It is called EdShelf.  It is a place to curate apps for particular purposes. For example, I created an EdShelf for formative assessment apps. You can follow fellow shelf creators and others can follow you.  I also like it because you can print out QR codes or URLs directly from the shelf.

See what you think of it.

Next week, the students will be using OneNote notebooks to take notes in science class. The OneNote notebooks will be synced via Microsoft Office 365. I found a terrific video about how one teacher uses the notebooks. You can watch it here.  I attended a session on using OneNote via O365 given by our tech director and an upper school math teacher during our in-house institute we had in March. I got excited about the possibilities then. I used OneNote notebooks with my students a couple of years ago for word study, but there was no syncing at that time. The syncing makes it so much better because like Hapara, I will be able to see the notes they are taking from my screen. (Hapara allows me to look into Gdocs, shared and unshared, as well as Gmail. It is a great tool.)

Speaking of note-taking skills, this week the students are adding VideoNot.es to their Chrome browser. It connects to Google Drive. VideoNot.es lets students watch a video while taking time-stamped notes. The screens are side-by-side so there is no flipping back and forth between Gdoc and video. A student can click on the note and the video will automatically jump to the time of the note. I’ll be using that with my students tomorrow. Like all Gdocs, it can be shared.

As you can probably tell, taking notes is a big focus for us this last quarter of fifth grade. Students will be snipping and using Google Draw to take some visual notes as well. Those can be inserted into their OneNote pages.

We are allowing students to use their notes for the remaining science tests. In this way, we hope they learn how to take good notes and why they are important for their learning.

Today I launched Classcraft with my science classes. The kids were very excited to say the least. I put up the Classcraft poster I was given at the workshop I attended at ASB Unplugged in Mumbai and the kids were attracted to it like magnets. It is very rewarding as a teacher to see your students get so motivated about something. The kids took to the gaming elements right away, of course. I’m no gamer so this is a steep learning curve for me. I watched video tutorials and read over the rules and points many, many times so I would have a clue going into it. I still struggle to find the screen I need to do certain tasks like changing team names and so on. Using the iPad with the Classcraft app will make managing the points much simpler for sure.

Quite a few of my students have ventured into the messaging functions and some have even found the content section and started those tasks I left there for them.

Tomorrow, we can’t spend as much time on it as we did today getting set up, but I think we will do a Random Event. After that, the students need to perform the tasks I put in the content section. I think it might change some of the less desirable behaviors that occur in one of my classes. I’ll keep you posted.

If you want to know more about Classcraft, check out this link.

I selected this topic for my research project because I won a premium subscription for Classcraft at ASB Unplugged when I attended a session on it. I will be launching it with my students when school starts again after spring break. I was curious to see the research on using games in the classroom. I learned about games, game-based learning, and Gamification. 

See what you think by watching my project. 

This is my latest course and assignment. Some of it has yet to be created, but I hope to use it this quarter. 

Watch this ten minute video to see what Yong Zhao believes we should be doing as educators to prepare kids for their future in the work world.

I needed to put together some research tools to share on Google+. Here is a Symbaloo webmix that shows them.