Category: Free Inquiry

https://create.kahoot.it/share/element-identifications/6f0cb98b-f925-4f4c-a91a-d745f417235d

I love Kahoots a lot, I always have since the first time I got to play one, but I’ve never actually explored making them. I have to say, the thing that surprised me most is that there is a subscription option for over $400 annually. That seems a tad bit ridiculous, but I’m not going to complain about the people who are paying to keep this game free for me. Above is a link to a Kahoot I put together fairly quickly, it is just a simple activity of naming elements on the periodic table.

I think that Kahoot has a solid place in science education. Mainly due to it’s ability to make review questions fun and engaging. The type of questions asked can also be a lot more involved than my example above. Below is a chemistry review set made by Kahoot, it offers far more challenging questions to review material.

Part of why Kahoot is so great is that I don’t have to make my own quiz lists, there are tons of other people who have already done it for me. The search system they use is simple but very effective. The biggest bonus they have is probably searching by grade. Subjects like chemistry are vast and can look significantly different at each grade level, so it is nice to be able to narrow it down quickly to the grade I will be teaching. They also have a very nice option to search by if the creator is a student or a teacher. While you still need to vet any quizzes you use, sorting for teacher created cuts out a lot of quizzes with unserious answers or questions.

Ultimately, this is a resource I plan to use a lot in the future. It is applicaple to every science course I might teach, and while I’ve never seen it used in a math class, I am excited to explore the math section that they offer.

I had a lot of fun with this one, despite the tone of my voice in the video below. I expect screencasting will be extremely useful as a teacher later on, as it will allow me to record a version of my classes for students who can’t make it to class that day. I hope to one day have a prerecorded version of my lectures for any class I’m teaching just in case students will benefit from hearing my words twice, of course thats a long way off.

For my screencast, I decided to open up MS Paint and doodle a bit. I chose this because these little drawing are super important for teaching chemistry, and I imagine I’ll be recording myself drawing like that a lot in the future. However, I will be wanting to draw on a tablet, and not with a mouse.

On the video editing front, I wasn’t to enthralled by what Screencastify had to offer. It felt clunky and I didn’t like how it kept trying to make me buy the full version. Also only having the ability to store 10 videos isn’t the end of the world as I can download them to my computer, but it is certainly a nuisance. Screencastify also doesn’t work for iPads which I imagine will be my main use for the technology, so I will have to look at other software.

One thing I was most excited to do in this course is figure out how Google Classroom works. I have seen every teacher at Link2Practice using it, and it seems amazing! SO now I have made my first practice classroom, with the title EdTech Fun!

I like how easy it is to to create a class as well as do simple things like posting assignments. Sadly I have no class participants so I wasn’t able to play around with grades much at all. That being said, here is the invite link to anyone who is interested https://classroom.google.com/c/NzM1NjAwMTY3MTYw?cjc=udztvl4 and here is the class code: udztvl4

There is also the ability to host discussions on the class page as well which is very fun.

I think this is a fantastic tool for all classrooms, and it is definitely the method I will be building my classrooms around in the future.