Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from May, 2018

Generate Instant Pear Decks

  I’ll keep this short as the video explains most of you. Any new educational technology can be complicated to dig into from scratch as you attempt to align it to learning outcomes.  Well, a new feature that Pear Deck has introduced has taken a giant leap forward to help educators do just that.  Before we jump into the new features, if you are unfamiliar with Pear Deck and why my students and I consider it the #1 EdTech tool that helps their learning, check out the video in the previous blog post.   But if you are more concerned with why you should even dive into Pear Deck or learn about this new AI generation of Pear Deck sessions to a learning target, check out the video below. Like I said, I’m keeping it short so you have time to watch the video. If you have questions, please contact me at mohammam@elmbrookschools.org or the Pear Deck Learning team at support@deck.peardeck.com . Also, check out the amazing Stacey Roshan's video on this update. 

Ready Student One...

In the book and movie Ready Player One, users visit a virtuality space called the Oasis to play, work, create, and learn. Although the world of the Oasis was set in the future, there are virtual spaces where students can learn and create in today. In a recent episode of Matt Miller’s Ditch That Textbook Podcast , I was introduced to a new virtual reality tool for the classroom by his guest Mike Drezek . That tool is CoSpaces EDU . It is a great tool for teachers and learners to build interactive 3D environments on their own our collaboratively.  These environments can be viewed on web enabled devices like smartphones, tablets, chromebooks, and desktops. Smartphones can be put into a VR viewer like Google Cardboard to make the environment a fully explorable VR experience. If you head to the Cospace web site and login, you can explore the gallery of user created environments.  If you want to get the VR experience in the gallery, you can download the Cospaced ED...

What's Motivating My Learners

Many educators champion the goal of giving learners more agency over their learning.  I put myself in the category of being on this journey of helping learners own their learning. While reading Kasey Bell’s new book Shake Up Learning , I encountered the following reflection question, “In your classroom, how do grades affect learning?” This question led me to step back and think about student motivation in general. We are a month away from the end of the school year. As students look towards the end of the year, I am looking to keep motivation high by using learning modes that my students find engaging.  So, I put together a survey for them to get some feedback about modes that they found engaging and those that were not. But in the first 3 questions, I asked them some more general questions about motivations in school. The answers I found were quite troubling. This was not designed to be a highly scientific endeavor just a snapshot of my students thoughts. I ha...