Friday, October 23, 2015

Plickers

Plickers is an amazing app and online program that allows you to track the progress of your students from the touch of your phone or iPad. Each student has a designated, computer generated answer sheet used to answer multiple choice questions. The students can hold up their answer sheets and the teacher can use their phone or iPad and scan the answer sheets. The program will then graph the results and provide data with the click of a button. 

Plickers is easy to use and offers these great features: 
  • Library- In this section, you can create questions to use for future lessons. You can create folders to easily organize your questions.
  • Reports- This section provides reports that teachers can use to assess their class's knowledge. The reports can be broken down by question and the teacher can see which students struggled to answer correctly and which students have a clear understanding of the information.
  • Classes-  You can set up your classes in this section of the program. This is great for middle school teacher, high school teachers,and curriculum specialists that see multiple classes throughout the school week. This program allows you to add multiple classes for assessment and will provide a unique answer sheet for each student.
  • Live View- This section allows the teacher to instantly show the students the results of the questions .
Plickers is a great tool for assessment and data collection. Plus, it's FREE to use!

https://www.plickers.com/


Saturday, October 10, 2015

Virtual Reality (VR) Education


World of Comenius, Virtual Reality Biology and Anatomy
This image features students from the Czech Republic participating in a new program called the World of Comenius, which is project that was piloted to enhance student performance and learning through creating a virtual 3-D learning environment (James, 2014). Computers with Oculus Rift DK2 VR headsets and mounted sensors were installed in to several schools in the Czech Republic (James, 2014). The VR headsets allowed the students to actively engage in 3-D learning and this led to students collaborating during the lesson and offering support to one another as they used the new technology. The sensors pick up student movement as they completed tasks that were given by the program. James (2014), blogger, visited the Czech Republic during the time of implementing this new technology and describes this new innovative method of learning as "intuitive" and realistic to real world situations.

James, P. (2014). This is the Beginning of VR Education, and It Will Only Get Better. Road to VR. Retrieved from http://www.roadtovr.com/world-of-comenius-virtual-reality-education-biology-lesson-leap-motion-oculus-rift-dk2/

James, P. (2014). World of Comenius, Czech Republic. Retrieved from http://www.roadtovr.com/world-of-comenius-virtual-reality-education-biology-lesson-leap-motion-oculus-rift-dk2/