I teach 5th and 6th grade STEM in the lovely Pacific Northwest in a small, rural town called Chimacum. My goal is to help students discover that all learning is life-long and that 21st century tools can be used for work as well as fun.
Dec 26
On our last day of 2024, the Friday before winter break, we ended each period with a Zen-like activity where students got to build a place that makes them happy in Minecraft Education. Students were already familiar with using Minecraft Education after participating in a few games during Computer Science Education Week. We started with …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2024/12/26/minecraft-education-free-build-activity-gbl/
Dec 26
If you use Pear Deck or Pear Assessment or Pear Tutor, you have got to try Pear Practice (formerly Giant Steps)! With Pear Practice you can take any quiz and turn it into an exciting game. Unlike Kahoot, Quizizz, Gimkit, Blooket, and other quiz-like games Pear Practice does its gaming differently. It begins by assigning …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2024/12/26/pear-practice-is-so-much-fun-gamification/
Oct 23
MirrorTalk AI, made by Swivl, has an amazing system built for consistent and regular reflection for both students and staff. When I first saw the app I was intrigued because it offered something no other EdTech tool or AI tool offered, a way for all kids to reflect and reflect quickly and easily on a …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2024/10/23/regular-reflection-with-mirrortalk-ai/
Oct 11
Five Student Profile Types of My Current Classes Generating the Profile Types Above Our district is having a few of us teachers, a principal, and our IT Director work with UnconstrainEd to learn how to leverage AI to work with student data. I have not done a lot with actual student data so this has …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2024/10/11/student-profile-cards-from-actual-data/
Oct 07
When I saw Eduguardians share this Jr. Eduguardians book on Twitter (x) I had to do it! After having to revamp my gamification plan for this year, I needed ways for students to engage more with their D&D style Star Trek characters from the Modiphius Star Trek adventures Tabletop rpg and this was a great …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2024/10/07/our-class-starship/
Sep 22
The 24-25 school year is under way and with the shutdown of Classcraft I am re-creating the gamification portion of my classes to continue to provide a layer of gameplay that can make the mundane more fun for kids. This is my 34th year teaching and there is never a dull moment when the new …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2024/09/22/gamification-sans-classcraft/
Jul 23
The 2023-24 school year was the first year since the 1999-2000 school year that I didn’t have grant money to spend (The End of a 24 Year Grant Streak). The bright side of that was that was also the first time in 24 years that I didn’t have to write an end of year report! …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2024/07/23/grant-streak-ended-but-two-more-grants-for-24-25/
Jul 23
Now that Magic School has a way for teachers to create chatbots for students like School AI I would love to choose the better one and use that one in the coming school year but I can’t. They are both that good! In the last several weeks of school, of the 23-24 school year, I …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2024/07/23/school-ai-and-magic-student-wow/
Jul 22
Earlier this year in February we were informed by HMH that as part of their purchase of the gamification learning management system (LMS), Classcraft, they were taking it down completely by June 30. To those of us who have been using Classcraft that announcement was a crushing blow. I wrote about it here. For the …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2024/07/22/classcraft-finally-taken-down/
Feb 23
I started this school year with parent permission to use Bing Chat (now Copilot) with my 5th and 6th graders because being under 13 years of age they cannot access tools such at ChatGPT or Quillbot, which can be used with students ages 13 to 18 with parent permission (the then Google Bard, now Google …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2024/02/23/school-ai-is-absolutely-amazing-rises-to-top-of-my-list/
I'm a Curipod Ambassador! :)
I've presented at NCCE
2016, 2017, 2019, 2022,
2023, 2024, and 2025!
I presented at WSTA 2015!
