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.
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/
Feb 22
David Mueller started a petition to let HMH know that there are those of us who would benefit and whose students would benefit if they could keep their current form of Classcraft running for us when they start their new version. Please take a moment to help us and sign this petition: Click Here It …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2024/02/22/the-end-of-the-best-student-engagement-gamification-tool-ive-ever-seen/
Dec 28
In a recent post by Larry Ferlazzo, Yet Another Nail-In-The-Coffin of AI Writing Detectors, he offers even more evidence dispelling the myth that AI detection software work. Even if AI detection can sometimes correctly identify whether or not a human wrote a piece of writing, they are so often wrong that they cannot be trusted. …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2023/12/28/ai-detection-or-ai-proofing/
Dec 28
Tammie Schrader, with whom I’ve been co-presenting for many years now, and I submitted four proposals to the upcoming 2024 NCCE Conference, the Northwest USA’s premier educational technology conference and we got three of our proposals accepted! There is still time to register so click the image or link above to secure your spot. Click …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2023/12/28/im-presenting-at-ncce24/
Dec 28
The Washington Education Association (WEA) is hosting an AI training for educators starting February 2024! This workshop series is open to anyone and if you are a certified teacher in WA state you will earn 15 STEM clock hours for attending all five two-hour sessions and for completing five hours of exploration of AI tools, …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2023/12/28/weas-artificial-intelligence-ai-in-education-workshop-series/
Dec 24
I have been looking for tools that my students can use in class if they need help with Math. I’m especially hoping AI tools can help students when I am busy with another student or working with a small group of students and their peers are busy working on different tasks. Sometimes teammates are helpful …
Permanent link to this article: https://educatoral.com/wordpress/2023/12/24/more-ai-tools-for-math-support-for-students/
I'm a Curipod Ambassador! :)
I've presented at NCCE
2016, 2017, 2019, 2022,
2023, 2024, and 2025!
I presented at WSTA 2015!
