Homecoming Week

It was homecoming this week and I had a blast dressing up for our spirit days!  This year, we had:

I rocked my stars and stripes suit on Monday as Captain America.  Tuesday I taught in shorts *gasp* and a Hawaiian shirt.  Wednesday I donned a fake mustache and was Ron Swanson but the hair above my lip turned out to be a little distracting so I had to take it off.  And Thursday I bused out my purple pants and wore purple head to toe to support my Wildcats.  High School students get Friday off to build floats for the Homecoming parade.  Here are a couple pictures of the winning floats!

It was a pretty successful week of teaching considering all of the distractions and I also found some a new Google Classroom feature I want to use next week during class.

Before I get to that feature, I want to add in an update on Adobe Spark.  I used Spark to create a collages of my students' projects and upload that to my class website. Here's how they turned out:

I shared these with both my students and their parents to showcase what they accomplished in the first units.  I'm hoping to improve on displaying student work this semester and I feel like Spark has some great tools for me to do that.

As I looked for apps this week, I was looking for something I could use in my classroom to assess students knowledge.  In terms of apps, I had no luck, so I ended up sharing information about an equation/formula creator add-on to Google Docs called EquatIO.  If you're interested, click this link to download, or this link to watch a video with information.  However, I kept looking for some formative assessment tool and found this article on Edutopia, one of the sites I started following in the first week of my Connected Educator class.  This article led me to check out Quizizz, and I'm excited to try this site out this week.

So Quizizz is an alternative to Kahoot! if you have used that site.  You can host an online quiz where students log-in and answer questions in a game-like format.  Here are a few differences between Kahoot and Quizizz:

One reason I like Quizizz is that the questions are student paced.  So I can assign the problems during class and my slower-paced students have the opportunity to finish them at home if the class period isn't enough time.  Another reason is the fact that players devices show the questions as well as the answers.  This means I can screenshot equations and diagrams over onto Quizizz for math questions, making my job much easier.  I also love the fact I can borrow quizzes created by other teachers.  There are a ton of quizzes I can search through and see the questions from before I decide on either borrowing one, or creating my own.  Finally, the best part of Quizizz is that it is linked to Google Classroom.  Instead of creating a quiz room and sharing the code, I can just ask Quizizz to post on my Google Classroom and it will be assigned as an assignment with a due date and everything.  I can't wait to give this a try this week in all three of my classes as a test review!

I only mentioned a few features of Quizizz.  If you would like to know more, check out this blog post highlighting the differences between Kahoot! and Quizizz.  I will also attach a video below that gives an overview of Quizizz's features!