ZAPTION review. - Cool for Social Studies!

Hello everybody

Yesterday I found out a cool site that enables us teachers to check student's comprehension while they are watching a video.

ZAPTION is an online tool that works with videos called "tours" that become alive... yes! ALIVE!
This means that we can upload a video and add MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS, TEXT, IMAGES, and OPEN RESPONSE BOXES to the video. Students will begin watching a video and suddenly a text box will show up to their left or right part of the screen with questions about the content they are actually watching!!!

How cool is this!!!

I believe this works great as a Flipped Classroom strategy. Not only students come prepare with a background knowledge on a topic or unit, but we as teachers can test to see if they are understanding or not.

ZAPTION also has an ANALYTICS feature that enables users to analyze data from viewers.
We can see questions or sections students struggle with and focus our attention on those.

Truly a great tool for Formative Assessments, differentiation and learning styles.

Here is my recent created ZAPTION TOUR!

http://zapt.io/tm4nc3ps

I shared my tour with students, so they could practice and review for our 1st Semestral Geography Exam.


Later I will let you know what they though about this new tool!



Cheers,

Gina

Piktochart, Canva and Google Docs for a Social Studies Project.

Hi again!

It's been a while since I published my last post.!

During last week and some days from this one, my students were working on a project. The topic was EUROPEAN COUNTRIES. We have been practicing with PURPOSE GAMES their capitals and physical features.  So, as a "wrap up" activity, My students were divided into 5 big groups, randomly chosen.  Each group was assigned a country and researched about it.

I worked with GOOGLE DOCS again, because it is engaging and easier for me to edit and check documents. Besides it's GREEN teaching and learning.

Every team created a folder in which they had to upload every item requested for the project.  The project was called: "Travel Agency" and each team created INFOGRAPHICS, POSTERS AND FLYERS to promote traveling to a European country.

They learned about CULTURE, GASTRONOMY, LANDFORMS, LANDMARKS and applied the 5 THEMES OF GEOGRAPHY too!

At the end, each team brought a typical food recipe from their team's country and the whole class tasted them.

It was a cool activity combined with technology integration!

For the INFOGRAPHIC, the students used 2 tools: "Piktochart and Canva".
I really liked PIKTOCHART because it is easier to use.  The icons and tools the website has makes it friendly for student's and teacher's use. The only "bad" thing I may say, it has is that the FREE version does not allow you to change the font color.

Canva is another site, pretty much the same as Piktochart, but the BIGGEST DIFFERENCE is that you may change the FONT color.
I have read other reviews and teachers prefer CANVA over PIKTOCHART.
I am definitely going to try Canva some more to prove this.

Ciao!

Gina

GOOGLE Sheets and Purpose Games- Mapping skills

Hello everybody!


I really love GOOGLE APPS and everything about them.

This quarter I have started working with my 7th grade students' mapping skills. So, I use a super cool website called Purpose Games to reinforce mapping skills.

To track students' progress and performance I created a  Google Sheet  to act as a log so students could access and enter their scores and time record every time they "PLAY" a mapping skill game.
The students know that they have to complete a series of attempts each week to prepare for the weekly test, and they can see which country or game they are going to master during a specific week, as well as the TEST date.

I started to use this for the first week just to see if it actually works, and when the test results came, I was SHOCKED!!!!
Students not only practice their mapping skills,but they also become ACCOUNTABLE of their learning in a fun way!

I really encourage teachers to use PURPOSE GAMES and GOOGLE SHEETS to track progress and master specific mapping skills.

Hope this post is useful!
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