Friday, October 13, 2017

Gamifying my Language Classroom with Classcraft

I was happy to see that the EdTechReview published my article on Classcraft. It really do love teaching with Classcraft. What really makes me happy is when I see students go on there and play with their characters over Fall Break and train their pets. This has got to be a challenge since the game language is set to Spanish. Here is the article: Gamifying my Language Classroom with Classcraft. What I really loved is when @utkarshlokesh, the publisher, said he wished he had such a classroom. He said I should present that at their conference in India. Not really in the budget since I'm headed to Hong Kong in January to talk about Genius Hour.

Sunday, October 8, 2017

It's Fall Break

So we made it to Fall Break. What a fantastic school year so far. My classes are so wonderful that I actually dream about them and it's not nightmares... Last night I dreamt someone presented their fantastic genius hour project. It was some sort of airplane that had incredible lighting fixtures. Our projects are coming to an end on October 20, 2017, a culmination of hard work and some struggles with some of the groups. I must say, that only two groups from all of my classes presented a certain struggle and I never quite knew if they were really working or just chatting with each other. Last Friday we did the update presentations and one of those two did present their music app to us. The other group that presented the struggle apparently dissolved. Turns out, one of the students was suspended for several days and he was the one who supposedly had the project at his house. The second group member was not in school on Friday. So the third student decided to take it upon himself to just code a game on Scratch, a plan that seemed to be working out actually, as he was making good progress. I suppose they can just call their original project an epic failure.... I was fine with that though, since at least this students made a concerted effort to create something. Several of the presentations surprised me and I had to congratulate the students on their efforts. Meanwhile I have been keeping up with the projects' progress on my Google Slide presentation for the 10th 21CLHK Conference in January. Well, what is a teacher to do over Fall Break? I am still trying to figure it out. Nate kind of threw a wrench into outdoor plans for the next few days, but Friday seems to be a good day for a Smokey Mountain National Park visit. My unannounced observation is coming up and I'm trying to figure out how to be sure to include higher level thinking in each of my lessons for the near future. Fall Break, I'm ready for you.