Help Your Students Focus With These Brain Breaks The closer to the holiday break we get, the harder it is for our students to focus; they’re either falling asleep or climbing the walls! We’re not above admitting that we’re in countdown mode too, but there’s still much to be done! To help you refocus your students’ energy and get them back on track, we’d like to share our favorite brain breaks from Rachel Lynette’s blog, Minds in Bloom. Help Your Students Focus With These Brain Breaks 30 Immersive Storytelling platforms, apps, resources & tools The following list was compiled by an amazing group of storytellers from around the world. Last semester, while I was teaching Building Storyworlds: the art, craft & biz of storytelling in 21c at Columbia University, I reached out via a facebook post for immersive storytelling platform, app, resource and tool recommendations. Each semester my students design, prototype and present an immersive adaption of Sherlock Holmes. I shared some of the following list with the class in an effort to provide a sandbox for their experimentation. Since the semester ended, I’ve discovered a few additional resources that I’ve included below.
Room Escape Maker - Create Escape The Room Games For Free Basic information ROOM ESCAPE MAKER is a free online application to create Escape The Room games. Build challenging casual point and click games with puzzles, hidden objects, safes with combination locks, and much more. YOU are game designer. And for free :-) The community 15 Games To Teach Kids About Social Issues - EasyBib Blog Incorporating games into the classroom is a great way to engage students and increase motivation. But how can social studies and history teachers use games to help students better understand social issues? Our guest contributor and expert on game-based learning, Dr. Matthew Farber, shares his favorite tools:
How Improv Can Open Up the Mind to Learning in the Classroom and Beyond Long before Amy Poehler became famous for her comic roles as Hillary Clinton on “Saturday Night Live,” and as indefatigable bureaucrat Leslie Knope on “Parks and Recreation,” she was a college freshman looking for something to do outside class. During her first week on campus, she auditioned for the school’s improvisational theater group, “My Mother’s Fleabag,” and discovered a passion. “Everyone was getting to act and be funny and write and direct and edit all at the same time,” she writes in her memoir, Yes, Please. “My college life sort of exploded in happiness,” she adds.
DiscoVR Beyond Expeditions: Virtual Reality Creation in Libraries In her fantastic session at AASL 2017 in Phoenix, Arizona, Katie McNamara laid out how to utilize virtual reality as a tool for creation with our students. She shared tools and ideas and led participants through creating their own 360-degree images (with their phones!) that they could then manipulate. Katie generously shared her slides with links and images to projects her students have created. First off, why VR? Hack the Classroom Registration - Microsoft Education Register Now Online live event Saturday, September 24, 2016 8:00 AM-10:00 AM PST As the world changes and is moving more rapidly, it can feel overwhelming to know what and how to incorporate new technology into your classroom. Hack the Classroom is an exciting online live event designed to inspire and enable you to incorporate new ideas and tools into your classroom so your students can achieve more.
7 Ways to Hack Your Classroom to Include Student Choice For a long time, when educators discussed differentiating instruction and meeting students’ individual needs, they did so through the framework of Learning Styles. However, in the last few years the idea of student achievement being impacted by lessons taught to their particular learning style has been debunked. No scientific, educational research has proven the validity of teaching for student learning styles; in fact, this blog post collected 10 statements from educational researchers that actually disprove the use of such approaches. We covered the same topic in The Myth of Learning Styles, where we made the point that, “Instructors should not just take into consideration a learner’s style, but also their background and interests.” This suggestion is based in solid research, which documents the positive relationship between student interest and academic success.