Skip to main content

Thank You for 20 "Mo" Years.

By
After 20 years of teaching at Brookfield Central, I am saying goodbye. Although I spent the majority of that time in the physics classroom alongside my learners. That changed for my last 18 weeks. I ended up in a place similar to where I started, teaching chemistry and biology. So, rather than dealing with juniors and seniors at the end of their high school careers, I was in classrooms with freshmen and sophomores still trying to find their place. At the same time, I was learning and teaching a set curriculum I hadn't taught in over a decade. So, we were learning. But, of course, I already knew the content.  The point of this post is to take a step back, reflect, and share the gratitude from the last students I had in my 20 years at Brookfield Central High School, as expressed through the cards and notes they made for me on my last day with them.  I don't take many "yay me" moments. But after 20 years, I'll soak this one in.
Post a Comment

Pear Deck, Quizlet, GimKit Appsmash

Image
By

As a part of March Madness, my students did a EdTech Tournament bracket. The finals were between Gimkit and Pear Deck. Pear Deck won, but my students love both tools. 




So when someone asked me if I ever thought of an appsmash between the two, I had to try something out. This is a triple app smash that links Pear Deck to Gimkit using Quizlet. The appsmash uses student generated explanations, definitions, and visuals to create a GimKit.
If you are not familiar with Pear Deck Vocabulary it allows students collaborate in the creation of flashcards from a list of predetermined terms or concepts. These flashcards are have both a written and visual component. For all the details on Pear Deck Vocabulary, I’d recommend heading over to Getting Started with Flashcard Factory.
If you are not familiar with Gimkit. It is a formative quiz game that allows students to work at questions at their own pace while competing against their classmates. In addition, participants can go to an in game store to purchase power ups. Learn more about Gimkit in this tutorial.
My students LOVE Gimkit, but it can take a while to create one. That’s why I was looking to harness the power of student created explanations to create a Gimkit set. So, not only are learners creating their own representations of terms and concepts. These representations are being pooled together and being used as a resources to lead formative assessments.
In Pear Deck Flashcard Factory, once a class created a set of flashcards, they can be exported to Quizlet and students can practice with them there. But, you can also export them from Quizlet to create a Gimkit. That’s the general flow of the appsmash.
To test out this appsmash, I put together a Pear Deck Vocabulary List of terms and concepts in our AP Physics Class dealing with Thermodynamics. Students created their own explanations for the terms and concepts along with visual representations.

The video below will show you how I took my students explanations from Pear Deck Flashcard Factory and got them into Gimkit by using Quizlet as the middleman. 



As you will see, I usually don’t provide any definition for learners in Pear Deck, so that section is blank and I put the example in there. If you provide definitions, you can delete them or just be sure that there is no line break between the definition and example by doing a little backspacing after pasting into Gimkit (see below).


Gimkit takes the term and explanation from each card and creates a multiple choice question for each one. It fills out the other choice options by adding other explanations as choices. The one potential issue is if you have multiple flash cards for a single term. It is possible that there are 2 correct answers for a single term because of the randomization of possible answers. So just be sure to double check your questions to make sure there aren’t multiple correct answers for a single question.
This is the first time I’ve tried this so I’m sure I’ll be looking to iterate the process. 

If you have Gimkit hacks, I would love to hear them!!!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Twitter Cards for Blogger

By
So, I’ve been seeing people with beautiful Twitter Cards in my Twitter Stream. They make it clear that there is a web page to visit and give a quick preview of what would be found. Something like the one below: I’ve been wondering how to get one of the cards to appear when I tweet out a link to my latest blog post.  Since I use Blogger, there is not a simple button to click to turn this on.  I had to find a way to paste new code into the HTML code of my blog.  It took some searching from multiple sites to get a completely functional.   This site though was quite helpful.  But, I’d like to walk you through my process and hopefully it helps a few out. There are a few types of Twitter Cards.  Two that at most frequently see are the basic summary card and the summary card with large image.  Below you can see the layout of each, but realize that they both have the same content pieces. This is going to look like a lot ...
13 comments
Read more

Personalized Learning Tasks and Roles

By
Yesterday, I read a great post by Jim Rickabaugh dealing with the roles of learner and teacher in a personalized learning environment by looking at tasks . The roles were set up on a continuum. This article timed perfectly with a reflection on part of Students at the Center by Allison Zmuda and Bena Kallick on idea generation and task development I had in mind. These two works are the focus of my reflection here. I think a key misunderstand teachers have when it comes to digging into personalizing learning is that for planning purposes, we no longer begin with standards but with student desires.  I believe like all good instruction, we need to start with the standards.  Think about it, standards are what we want all learners to know and be able to do as a result of passing through our educational system. That is why it is essential that we make sure that standards are representative of what we believe is important for learners to be informed and productive in th...
1 comment
Read more

Pear Deck 101 + Q&A

By
  Last week, I presented as a part of Pear Deck’s Pear Fair 2020. My presentation was Pear Deck 101 for Google Slides. During the presentation, there was a live chat. Many people said it went too fast for a 101 Session. Luckily, it was recorded so it can be rewatched.  Also, many said that they wanted to know how to build a Pear Deck first. I structured the presentation to show what Pear Deck was before showing how to make one. Perhaps that wasn’t the best structure. But, I’m going to stick with my philosophy of showing what something is before showing how to make it. The presentation, which can be watched below, was structured in several different sections What is Pear Deck? Providing an overview of the experience from the Teacher and Student perspectives. How do you build a Pear Deck in Google Slides? How do you start a Pear Deck presentation? How do you end a Pear Deck presentation? Here is the Slideshow I shared during the session bit.ly/pearfair101 Time really flew in...
2 comments
Read more