One week down & I still love it. The first day I spent getting to know the kids, and the rest have been spent combining that AND trying to teach our new unit on WWII. The teacher and then long-term sub before me weren’t big on technology & while I haven’t used much, (in my book) the kids are in shock at the difference between me and them. I thought I’d share some of my favorite tools from this week in case anyone was looking for new ideas!
1. Online Stopwatch – my savior. One of my many problems is that I’m constantly running out of time & am horrible at reminding the kids to pace them selves. Enter this site – all I have to do is project a running stopwatch that counts down the minutes the kids have left on an assignment. This week I used it to pace kids during a jigsaw activity and it worked perfectly!
2. Pandora – I know this isn’t a new site at all, but I think I use just as much at work as I do in my personal life. I’ll avoid the commercial for what I think is one of the best music sites EVER & just explain how I use this in my classroom. As a rule, music is one of my favorite behavior management techniques. Anytime there’s small group work, or an activity that’s more hands on, I play (calmish) music in the background. The kids all know my rule – as long as I can hear my music, you may talk. But the instant I can’t hear my Jack Johnson station – talking privileges are gone. It’s hilarious if you ever want to hear kids shush each other and say the words “I can’t hear Rob Thomas guys, we should really be quieter.”
3. Sporcle – Again, not a new site, but that doesn’t mean we should forget how awesome it is. What I like about Sporcle are all the quizzes they have on school appropriate, content-related, topics. I’m making my kids take a map quiz of Europe during the WWII unit, and Sporcle is a great way to have them practice in and out of class. All I do is project it, or have students work on it in pairs and see who can answer the quiz the quickest. The kids love it, and during chill days I’ll sometimes reward them with quizzes on non-school subjects, like NFL teams, or Harry Potter. And the title of this blog post does come from a sporcle match. A child challenged me to a Harry Potter quiz-off, and after being dominated I heard him tell his friend “I can’t believe I just got pwned by Ms. B.” Haha, sorry kids.