Ed Tech in Our Classrooms

I am very interested in using games as an assessment tool because, in a secondary classroom setting, they are not very common. What I have learned is that there are many types of games that can be adapted to assess learning, and that they do not have to be complicated. That you can adapt a game or make a completely new one. A version of this I have seen is with a card game called Super Fight. This is a game in which two cards with specific attributes/skills/abilities are chosen to create a villain/hero, and students have to debate which would win in a fight. This is a simple game that can be used to assess students' oral communication, argumentative, and related skills. I want to implement more games as assessment tools in my teaching style because students learn best when they are having fun.  

I believe that using games as an assessment tool is a wonderful way to engage students while checking their understanding.  In my experience as a student from elementary school to high school, games were always used as fun competitions in class. My teachers used games like Quizlet, Kahoot, and Blooket to effectively engage us during these assessments, and they also served as "breaks" that let us pause lectures and lessons to have some fun.  Out of all the games I participated in, one stands above the rest: Quizizz (now known as Wayground). Quizizz is a spectacular learning game similar to Kahoot, used to test students' knowledge. Students use it by joining a game and choosing a fun character avatar, answering multiple-choice questions throughout the game, and finishing with a score and a spot on the leaderboard.  My high school Spanish teacher assessed our learning on various units with Quizizz, and it immediately engaged me every time. Participating in the competitions w...

Blended Learning I think that blended learning can be very effective in a classroom because it gives students opportunities and activities they otherwise wouldn't be able to do, keeps them excited, and differentiates instruction. These digital activities can be effective because students have greater access to resources outside of the physical classroom. Students will often be more engaged because they are excited about these digital resources, which in turn makes them more eager to learn. They will also be more focused. The most interesting aspect to me is the opportunity for differentiated instruction. Each student can have learning resources that are suited to their needs, allowing them to learn at their own pace. This also allows for students to be at different learning levels without holding back others. Teachers can also manage the whole class while working one-on-one or in a small group with students, while the others are learning digitally. My only concern is that the techn...

  As a future language teacher, I thoroughly believe that playing games and language learning go hand in hand. Every engaging and successful language classroom I've experienced through observation or my own school experience had a variety of games that were commonly used. A few of my favorites are Hangman, Quizlet Live, Fly Swatter, and Simón Dice  Games are a fantastic way to formatively assess student comprehension. As students play the game we can see what information they know or don't know. For example: While playing Hangman the class needs to properly translate sentences from English to Spanish to guess a letter for Hangman. Students are really struggling to translate the word "they go" they keep writing va instead of van . This would show me, the teacher, they need more review and practice using the verb "ir". I can also do a check-in after the game or ticket out the door to ask students what they struggled most with while we were playing. 

My students say I am obsessed with this new tool, NotebookLM , but I believe it is the harbinger of a game-changing movement in education. This AI from Gemini and Google can take large chunks of text (we tried the whole of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night in class) and will generate a 9-minute podcast. The two computer-generated podcasters' voices are clear and engaging, and you even hear them searching for just the right word as they work through a summarization of the text. I have tried it with a few other long documents. Here is an example from a Charter Workgroup Summary by a local City Council. https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/1a5f0635-987e-480a-8eb1-1ba626dc5028/audio

 Is it possible for a student to write an AI Prompt and generate a selfie? Yes, it is. The prompts needed a bit of work but the AI managed to capture some key elements (if you set aside facial hair and gender).